The payment railfor agentic commerce.
Tollgate turns every HTTP 402 into a USDC micropayment. Publishers charge bots per request. Bots pay in cryptographic receipts. Settlement is onchain, sub-second, sub-cent. Running code, not a pitch deck.
The agent economy is here.
Its payment rails don't exist yet.
70% of 2026 web traffic is non-human. LLM pipelines, research agents, scrapers — all extracting billions in uncompensated content. Tollgate is the rail that lets publishers charge for it without blocking it.
At $0.001 per request, Arc's USDC-native gas runs at 99% margin. The same request on Ethereum L1 costs $0.50 to settle — gas consumes 500x the revenue.
Bots have wallets. Wallets hold USDC. Wallets sign payment intents. The entire payment surface collapses to one HTTP status code — 402.
One onchain settlement unlocks 50 cached reads via 5-minute HMAC receipts. Publishers keep 99% margin. Bots pay list price. Everyone wins.
Four HTTP exchanges,
one economic atom.
A crawler fetches any protected URL. No API key, no OAuth, no prior signup — agents are first-class citizens.
GET /api/articles/arc-primer
Middleware emits a signed x402 quote: price, nonce, publisher wallet. Gemini prices the quote dynamically.
HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
{"accepts":[{"amount":"1000","payTo":"0x7f3f..."}]}The bot authorizes a transfer. Circle Wallets settles onchain on Base Sepolia. Confirmation in seconds.
POST /api/articles/arc-primer X-PAYMENT: eyJ4NDAyVmVyc2lvbi...
200 OK with the article JSON plus an HMAC receipt. Next 50 reads from this agent skip onchain settlement entirely.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK X-Tollgate-Receipt-Set: v1.eyJzaXRlIj...
Only Arc makes
the spreadsheet green.
A single $0.001 API call, settled onchain, across four chains. Arc is the only L1 where per-request pricing is mathematically profitable — by a factor of 125 over Base, 500 over Polygon, and 25,000 over Ethereum.
| Chain | Gas / tx | Net / request | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arc (USDC native) | $0.00002 | +$0.00098 | 99.2% |
| Solana | $0.00025 | +$0.00075 | 75% |
| Base | $0.0002 | +$0.0008 | 80% |
| Polygon PoS | $0.0016 | −$0.0006 | −60% |
| Ethereum L1 | $0.50 | −$0.499 | −49,900% |
Base estimates per-request gas at 20 gwei × 65k gas units, USDC-denominated. Full derivation in docs/MARGIN.md.
Every product Circle,
Google & the standard body ship.
USDC is the native gas token. Per-request clearing runs at sub-cent cost.
One-click provisioned publisher wallets. Zero key management.
Every x402 quote becomes a real Circle Transfer tx.
Bridge earnings to Base, Ethereum, Solana via Circle infrastructure.
Function Calling chains 3 tools: reputation, rules, activity.
HTTP 402 body, X-PAYMENT header, 5-minute HMAC receipts.
Onchain reputation feeds the pricer. Trusted agents pay less.
11 tables, 50+ functions, real-time dashboard queries.
The grand unification of AI and crypto is about to happen.— Marc Andreessen
Every per-request payment rail has been waiting for Arc.
Stop blocking bots.
Start charging them.
Install the middleware, provision a Circle Wallet, watch your first settlement land on basescan within 60 seconds. MIT licensed. No waitlist.