PAYMENT CHANNELS: 1 MILLION PAYMENTS PER SECOND

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

A new Solana primitive called payment channels addresses the per-call signature bottleneck in agentic micropayment workflows by letting agents authorize a spending ceiling once, meter usage off-chain via signed messages at zero transaction cost, and settle the full session in a single on-chain transaction across the x402 and MPP protocols. Funds remain non-custodial throughout, held in program-controlled escrow rather than operator balances, unlike prepaid credit systems where balances are tracked off-chain by the service provider. Benchmarks showed 100,000 unique wallets processing over 1 million payments per second, equivalent to more than 80 billion payments in 24 hours at a processing cost of $0.0078 per million payments. The spec is public, and the program is open source. Alibaba Cloud launched live inference endpoints with payment channels on day one.