Circle x Goldsky: Nanopayments as the payment layer for blockchain data

tl;dr: Starting today, any agent or developer can access Goldsky's Edge RPC: 40+ EVM networks without creating a Goldsky account.

You can pay per-request in stablecoins via Nanopayments powered by Circle Gateway and the x402 protocol. No API key provisioning or human in the loop required.

And soon, any Goldsky user can do the same thing with their own subgraphs: flip a switch, set a price, and your indexed data becomes a paid API endpoint reachable by agents and developers across your ecosystem. Goldsky and Nanopayments handle the payment rails. You collect the revenue.

The problem with APIs and AI agents

Agents can make HTTP requests. That part works fine. What they can't do is sign up for a billing account, enter a credit card, wait for an email confirmation, and then get the API key they need with the credentials to spend that money.

The payments barrier is managed by a credentials barrier; neither of which is designed for agents: these systems have historically assumed a human is sitting at the keyboard and that assumption is no longer a sound one.

So how does an agent discover, negotiate, and pay for API access programmatically, with no prior relationship with the provider? With x402 – an open protocol that gives the HTTP 402 status a real job.

The mechanics of x402 are simple:

1. Agents make a request to an API endpoint
2. The server responds that payment is required with "402"
3. The agent pays; constructing a stablecoin transaction and including the payment proof, and then sends another request
4. The server verifies and responds with the requested data. No credentials needed, as credentials were always partially a gateway to managing payments.
5. In the future, the agent can remember the API requires payment, and include a payment in advance rather than getting the 402 first.

Why x402 alone hasn't worked

Traditional onchain payments have a gas problem. If a single RPC call costs fractions of a cent, paying for it onchain with even a $0.01 gas fee makes no economic sense. You'd spend more on settlement than on the actual service.

Take Goldsky Edge, our hosted RPC service. It costs $5 per million requests, or $0.000005. A gas fee of even 1/1000 of a cent (very reasonable by blockchain standards) would triple the cost of the call. Users would be spending more on executing the transaction than paying for the API call, breaking the economics both for the buyer and the service provider.

How Nanopayments makes sub-cent pricing viable

Nanopayments sidesteps the gas problem with a batched settlement model. Rather than settling every transaction onchain individually, per-request authorization happens off-chain and payments are settled onchain in batches.

An agent deposits USDC into a Gateway wallet once (the only call that costs gas). From there, each payment is a signed authorization that Nanopayments validates instantly; the merchant gets confirmation and releases the data. Thousands of these authorizations settle together in a single onchain batch, with Nanopayments covering the batch-level gas at settlement.

The buyer pays gas once; the seller pays none at all. The result: sub-cent payments that are actually sub-cent, not sub-cent-plus-gas.

AI agents can access blockchain data via Edge RPC

Goldsky Edge is our RPC layer: a globally distributed, finality-aware proxy across 40+ EVM-compatible networks. It handles provider failover, caches finalized blocks aggressively, and routes requests to the nearest healthy node. (For a full technical breakdown of how Edge works under the hood, see our Edge architecture post )

With Nanopayments enabled, Edge RPC now has a second access path alongside the standard API key flow:

• Standard path: Create a Goldsky account, generate an endpoint, use your API key. Same as before.
• x402 path: Hit the x402-enabled endpoint with no credentials. Receive a 402 with payment instructions. Pay with a funded wallet and get your data, or if you pre-pay you get your data immediately on the first call.

Pricing is identical across both paths. Our standard Edge RPC plan runs $5/million requests. Through the Nanopayments layer, that same per-request rate is encoded into the 402 payment payload your agent receives. What this means in practice:

• An agent can discover and access blockchain data dynamically. No operator needs to pre-provision credentials. The agent handles the full payment handshake autonomously.
• Multi-chain access is immediate. The same endpoint covers Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, and 37+ other networks. The agent doesn't need separate accounts or keys per chain.

Monetizing subgraphs via x402 with Nanopayments

Edge RPC via Nanopayments is only the beginning. The larger vision is to enable every Goldsky user to monetize their infrastructure without having to touch the payment rails. We're opening a beta for subgraph monetization via x402. Here's how it works:

• Deploy a subgraph on Goldsky, or use one you already have running.
• Enable x402 on that subgraph from your dashboard.
• Set a price per request and provide a deposit wallet address.
• Goldsky takes a flat minimum fee to cover operating costs. The rest routes to your wallet automatically.

That's it. Your subgraph becomes a paid API endpoint, reachable by any agent. Calls made via x402 are excluded from your rate limits, so traffic from third-party developers and builders can access your infrastructure without eating into your own usage. Circle handles custody and settlement, Goldsky handles routing and payouts, and you don't have to write a payment contract or run a billing system. You set a price and collect revenue.

If you've built a high-quality subgraph indexing a protocol, a chain, or a dataset that other developers need, you can now charge for access directly and make it available to the growing ecosystem of agents consuming onchain data programmatically.

For agent developers: View the docs →
The X402-enabled Edge RPC endpoint is live today. No account required (just a funded wallet!)

For subgraph owners: Sign up for the monetization beta →
Set your price, provide a wallet address, and we'll handle the rest.

For everyone else: Create a free Goldsky account →
Standard Edge RPC access, 40+ networks, no credit card required to start.