Polygon Labs has tested a new agent payment system that processed more than 11 million verified payment updates per second across 25 independently scaling hubs while keeping final settlement anchored to Polygon Chain. The benchmark, announced September 25, is the latest entry in a escalating race to build payment infrastructure for AI agents, and it stakes out a scaling model that deliberately avoids putting millions of individual transactions onchain.
Agent pay channels separate payments from settlement
The system, called agent pay channels, is designed for software that pays for inference, data, API calls and other services as they are consumed, instead of sending every individual payment through an onchain transaction. Each payment update was confirmed by the payment engine in 20 microseconds, excluding network latency between the user and the hub.
The mechanics work in layers. A payer deposits funds into a vendor-agnostic channel contract on Polygon and binds a session key; the deposited amount determines how much the agent can spend during the session. Once a service requests payment through x402, the agent sends signed cumulative vouchers through a hub as it consumes the service. The hub checks the signature, price, replay ID, authorization ceiling and remaining escrow before returning a receipt, and a valid receipt lets the provider release the next unit of work, whether that is a token window, data result or API response.
Instead of putting each payment on Polygon individually, the hub batches the accumulated state and posts an epoch Merkle root to the chain. Providers prove what they earned against the root and claim the funds. The design gives x402 and the channel separate roles: x402 lets an online service state a price and request payment over HTTP, using the long-dormant 402 “Payment Required” status code, while the channel processes repeated payment updates and later batches them for settlement.
How the 11 million figure was reached
Polygon tested the architecture against an OpenRouter-style inference API on a live devnet, with a signed payment triggered through the channel for every 100-token window. Polygon says the payment path was real while the inference provider itself was a stand-in. Performance differed depending on how much of the payment stack was included. A full x402 path involving the agent, site, facilitator and hub processed roughly 40,000 payments per second, with 2.4 million payments recorded in the test at a 100 percent success rate.
Testing the engine directly on a single 24-core server produced between 533,000 and 536,000 fully verified payments per second. Distributing the workload across 25 independently scaling hubs of 16 vCPUs each is where the system crossed 11 million payment updates per second.
The figure does not mean Polygon Chain itself processed 11 million onchain transactions per second. Individual payment updates moved through offchain channels, while deposited funds remained secured on Polygon and accumulated payment states settled onchain in batches. The hubs partition payers and do not coordinate with each other while payments are being processed, so capacity can be added by running more hubs. Based on the 25-hub test, Polygon estimates a larger fleet could process more than 100 million payment updates per second. Participants configure when accumulated payments settle: after one payment, 50,000 updates or 100 million, depending on the service. The benchmark configuration put the processing cost for one billion payment updates at approximately 0.15 USD.
x402 momentum across networks
Polygon’s test arrives as x402 adoption spreads across blockchain ecosystems. Circle reported that USDC accounted for 99.3 percent of x402 payment volume measured during the second quarter in its data, though that figure did not represent all AI agent payment systems. Cardano added x402 to its software stack in September, with an initial TypeScript release tested on pre-production but not yet demonstrated commercially on mainnet. Block joined the x402 Foundation this week and contributed Lightning support, giving developers a Bitcoin-based payment option, while the foundation reported 75.41 million transactions and 24.24 million USD in volume over a recent 30-day period. On the XRP Ledger, AI agents had generated more than 1.4 million transactions by July.
Fitting the Open Money Stack
The agent pay channel system is expected to connect with Polygon’s Open Money Stack, which brings together the infrastructure used to move funds into applications, hold them, apply spending rules and settle accumulated value. Polygon has spent much of 2026 building payments infrastructure around stablecoins and institutional settlement. PayPal USD became native on Polygon in July through the Open Money Stack, giving businesses access to PYUSD alongside wallets, fiat ramps and compliance tools, and Polygon Labs said at the time that the network had settled more than 2.6 trillion USD in stablecoin transactions. The network reduced its average block time to 1.75 seconds in May, taking estimated theoretical onchain throughput to roughly 3,260 transactions per second.
Agent pay channels use a different scaling model, because millions of individual payment updates do not compete for that onchain capacity. Funds are committed to the channel first, updates happen offchain, and Polygon records the resulting settlement in batches. Polygon says the setup targets services that charge by individual API call, token, lookup or completed task, allowing an agent to move between providers without maintaining a separately funded prepaid account with each one.
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20 microsecond confirmation per voucher is absurd. visa nets everything out in batches and still settles days later, polygon basically built a clearinghouse that fits inside one machine
11 million updates a second and final settlement still lands on the polygon chain. the 20 microsecond confirmation is the wild part, thats faster than most db writes lol
Twenty five independently scaling hubs and settlement still anchored to Polygon. Impressive benchmark but I want to see what happens when a hub disputes a voucher.
dispute path is what i wondered about too. cumulative vouchers sound great until an agent burns through its session deposit mid job
the receipt model handles it, no valid receipt and the provider stops releasing work. the agent just stalls mid job instead of owing anything, annoying for the agent, safe for the channel
agent stalling mid job is also a denial of service vector tho. a provider starves a rival agent by withholding receipts and the channel just shrugs
a provider withholding receipts just gets the channel closed and the bond slashed no? the deposit is the incentive, same trick as watchtowers on lightning
starving a rival agent by withholding receipts is a real griefing angle, but the damage caps at the session deposit. costly for the provider, bounded for the payer
deposit runs out mid job and the agent opens a new session with a fresh key, its in the spec. the actual gap is who arbitrates vouchers a hub claims but never delivered
the channel contract caps exposure to the deposit tho. worst case a bad hub eats a session worth of vouchers, settlement root still anchored on polygon
11M updates a second is the headline but the session deposit is the actual product. bounded burn is the thing micropayments never solved
20 microsecond confirmation per update is the number nobody is talking about. thats faster than most trading matching engines lol
20 microseconds is engine time only, the fine print excludes network latency. still fastest verification story in payments by a mile
Faster than matching engines because there is no ordering auction, just cumulative voucher verification. The comparison kind of sells the design short.
20 microseconds is signature check only, the fine print excludes network latency. real round trip to the hub and youre at normal api speeds, still fast but not matching engine fast
right, 20 microseconds is engine time only. still, even with network latency the vouchers verify in batch against the epoch root, and thats the part older micropayment designs never had
11 million updates a second and the question nobody asks is who operates the 25 hubs. throughput decentralized, operators very much not
Fair point on the 25 hub operators, though final settlement still anchors back to the Polygon chain so a rogue hub cant fake the root. The real trust question is how fast you can exit when a hub stalls you.
The epoch Merkle root batching is the actual story here. Providers prove earnings against the root instead of spamming Polygon with millions of txs. Sensible design.
@Sanne agree, tho 25 independently scaling hubs sounds great until one hub decides to be naughty. who audits the voucher signatures at that scale
the merkle root batching is elegant but epoch length is the hidden knob. long epochs and providers wait on earnings, short ones and the polygon fee savings shrink
11 million updates per second is a benchmark number and benchmarks lie, but the session deposit model capping agent spend is the quietly good design choice.
session key bound to a capped deposit is the unglamorous core here. an agent that can only burn what was deposited means a compromised agent is a bad afternoon, not a drained treasury
x402 plus session keys capping spend per session is the part that matters for real agents. micropayments for inference failed in 2015 because nothing bounded the burn, deposits fix the trust problem
11M updates a second across 25 hubs and the pitch is still agents paying for inference. show me one ai product doing a million paid api calls a day first