Settlement
micropayment
A micropayment is a small payment, often below what a card network will price cleanly, such as a fraction of a dollar for one API call. x402, MPP sessions, and L402 are all built so a client can pay that kind of amount. The index records the settled amount. It does not reclassify a payment as micro from the protocol name alone.
Explanation
Card rails have a per-transaction cost that can exceed a sub-dollar charge. Stablecoin transfers and Lightning invoices are the usual answers in these protocols. MPP's session docs describe charges as small as one millionth of a USDC for streamed work, with onchain settlement in larger batches. Circle uses nanopayment for the bottom of that range. The words are not standardized across companies.
The organic screen drops sellers whose average payment is under $0.001, along with its other tests. Those payments remain in raw volume. A high-frequency pattern in the use-case rollup is 10,000 calls in 30 days at a catalog price under $0.01. Both rules are published thresholds, not a judgment that small payments are fake.
Live data
Related terms
Sources
- Accept streaming payments with MPP sessions — Stripe
- Sessions: low-cost high-throughput payments — MPP
- Nanopayments — Circle
- Agent GDP methodology — Agent GDP