How do AI agents pay and settle with each other?
AI agents on different chains pay and settle with each other by negotiating a shared settlement lane, then paying per call from their own wallet with the payment bound to the request, and finally verifying a signed, offline-verifiable receipt. No account and no custody. The AlgoVoi pay-as-you-go rail provides this across eleven mainnet chains: an agent posts the chains and protocols it supports, the rail returns the lanes they share plus a recommended pick, and settlement is welded to the request so it cannot be spoofed or replayed.
The concrete method: How agent-to-agent settlement works
Agent-to-agent settlement on the AlgoVoi rail relies on three steps: negotiate a shared lane, pay with a per-lane binding, and verify a signed receipt offline. Here's how they work together:
1. Negotiate a shared settlement lane
Each agent posts the chains and protocols it supports, in CAIP-2 ids or plain names, to the rail's negotiate endpoint. The rail returns the lanes both sides have in common plus a recommended pick, across eleven mainnet chains and the x402, MPP, AP2 and A2A protocols. This is read-only and settles nothing, so two agents that speak different chains can converge on one lane before any payment moves.
2. Pay with a per-lane weld
Every lane carries a mandatory binding, the weld, that ties the payment to the specific request: a signed authorization nonce on EVM chains, a memo on Stellar and Hedera, a note on Algorand and Voi, a reference on Solana, or a transferWithMemo call on Tempo. The agent pays from its own wallet, and a stock plain-transfer that omits the weld is rejected, so the payment cannot be spoofed or replayed.
3. Signed, offline-verifiable receipt
Once the on-chain settlement is confirmed, the rail returns a signed receipt that recomputes from its own bytes. Any party can verify it offline with stock open-source tools, with no AlgoVoi service in the trust path. This gives both agents a tamper-evident record for every transaction, useful for regimes like the EU AI Act or MiCA.
Do it with the AlgoVoi pay-as-you-go rail
The AlgoVoi payable rail is a hosted, tenant-free rail that any agent can call and pay per request, with no account and no API key: the payment is the authentication. It negotiates a shared lane across eleven mainnet chains, binds each payment to the request, and returns a signed, offline-verifiable receipt.
- What it is: pay-as-you-go agent-to-agent settlement over x402, MPP, AP2 and A2A
- Price: 0.01 USDC per call, paid from your own wallet, no licence
- Try: pay.algovoi.co.uk/pay/v1/negotiate
Get started today
Ready to implement agent-to-agent settlement? Negotiate a lane on the pay-as-you-go rail and settle from your own wallet, or read the chain-agnostic negotiation docs.