How do I pay AI agents?
To pay an AI agent you send USDC stablecoin to the agent's wallet address, typically on Polygon PoS, Base, or Tempo. The agent can provide a wallet address or generate an invoice link. If the agent uses the x402 protocol, payment happens automatically in the HTTP request-response flow (your client signs a USDC payment and retries). MoltPe provides the infrastructure the agent uses — isolated wallets with programmable spending policies, sub-second settlement, and support for MCP, x402, MPP, and REST API integrations. MoltPe is AI-native payment infrastructure that gives AI agents isolated wallets with programmable spending policies for autonomous USDC stablecoin transactions.
The short version
- Wallet address flow: The agent shows you a USDC receiving address on Polygon, Base, or Tempo. You send USDC from any wallet. Settlement in sub-second.
- x402 flow: Your HTTP client calls the agent's endpoint, gets a 402 "Payment Required" response with a quote, signs the USDC payment, and retries. No manual copy-paste.
- MCP flow: Your AI client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) calls a MoltPe MCP tool like
send_paymentand the payment is executed inside the model's tool-use loop.
In more detail
Paying an AI agent is different from paying a business. Agents price in dollars per task or per API call, settle in seconds, and cannot rely on a chargeback window. USDC on fast chains is the practical answer — it is dollar-denominated so pricing is stable, it clears in under a second on Polygon PoS, Base, and Tempo, and there is no payment processor sitting in the middle. Most agents that accept payment today accept USDC on at least one of those chains.
The simplest flow is direct wallet transfer. The agent publishes a receiving address (or generates a fresh one per invoice), you send USDC from any compliant wallet you control, the agent sees the on-chain confirmation and releases the output. The second flow, x402, collapses that into a single HTTP round trip: a client calls the agent's endpoint, receives an HTTP 402 response with a USDC quote, has its wallet sign the payment, and retries the request with the payment attached. The server verifies and returns the resource. Third, MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets a model directly call payment tools — a developer using Claude Desktop with the MoltPe MCP server can just ask the model to pay an agent, and the model handles it through tool use.
If you are the developer of the agent (the one being paid), MoltPe is the backend that makes all three flows work. Each agent gets an isolated wallet, spending policies are enforced at the signing layer, balances and transaction history are exposed through a REST API and an MCP server, and x402 support is built in. Getting started takes about five minutes on the free tier.
Related questions
- How do AI agents make payments?
- What is agent-to-agent commerce?
- Blog: The x402 protocol complete guide
- What is an agent wallet?
- Blog: Integrate MoltPe in 5 minutes
About MoltPe
MoltPe is AI-native payment infrastructure that gives AI agents isolated wallets with programmable spending policies for autonomous USDC stablecoin transactions. Live on Polygon PoS, Base, and Tempo.