HOW CIRCLE'S NANOPAYMENTS WORK

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Circle's Nanopayments enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 by having buyers sign offchain EIP-3009 authorization messages routed through the Circle Gateway, which aggregates thousands of those signatures and settles them in a single periodic onchain batch transaction, reducing effective gas costs to near-zero. The buyer's initial deposit is the only onchain transaction, with subsequent payments locked against balance in the Gateway and fulfilled immediately upon signature verification, enabling real-time resource delivery via the x402 protocol. The Circle Gateway operates inside an AWS Nitro Enclave TEE, with batch signing keys protected by AWS KMS and inaccessible to Circle personnel, providing a verifiable trust boundary without requiring a decentralized sequencer.