Polygon payment channels hit 11 million updates per second across 25 hubs

Polygon has tested a new agent payment system that processed more than 11 million verified payment updates per second across 25 hubs while keeping final settlement anchored to Polygon Chain.

Summary

• Polygon's agent pay channels processed more than 11 million verified payment updates per second across 25 independently scaling hubs.
• Individual payments move through channels offchain, while accumulated payment states are settled on Polygon in batches.
• The system uses x402 for payment requests and lets AI agents pay for tokens, API calls, data and other services as they consume them.
• Polygon said a larger hub fleet could process more than 100 million payment updates per second based on the architecture tested.

Polygon Labs said the benchmark used agent pay channels designed for software that pays for inference, data, API calls and other services as they are consumed, instead of sending every individual payment through an onchain transaction.

The system combines high frequency offchain payment updates with batched settlement on Polygon, allowing an agent to make repeated small payments while working through a task. Each update was confirmed by the payment engine in 20 microseconds, excluding network latency between the user and the hub.

Polygon payment channels separate payments from settlement

Agent pay channels begin with a payer depositing funds into a vendor agnostic channel contract on Polygon and binding a session key. The deposited amount determines how much the agent can spend during the session.

Once a service requests payment through x402, the agent sends signed cumulative vouchers through a hub as it consumes the service. The hub checks the signature, price, replay ID, authorization ceiling and remaining escrow before returning a receipt.

A valid receipt lets the provider release the next unit of work, which could be a token window, data result, API response or another service. Instead of putting each payment on Polygon individually, the hub batches the accumulated state and posts an epoch Merkle root to the chain. Providers can then prove what they earned against the root and claim the funds.

The design gives x402 and the payment channel separate roles. The x402 protocol lets an online service state a price and request payment over HTTP, while the channel processes repeated payment updates and later batches them for settlement.

Interest in x402 has grown as developers build payment infrastructure for autonomous software. The protocol uses HTTP's 402 "Payment Required" status code to let software pay for online resources without relying on a conventional checkout process. As crypto.news previously reported, agents can use the system to buy compute, data and other services while carrying out tasks.

How Polygon reached 11 million payments per second

Polygon tested the architecture against an OpenRouter style inference API on a live devnet. A signed payment was triggered through the channel for every 100 token window, with Polygon saying the payment path was real while the inference provider itself was a stand in.

Performance differed depending on how much of the payment stack was included in the test. A full x402 path involving the agent, site, facilitator and hub processed roughly 40,000 payments per second. Polygon recorded 2.4 million payments in the test with a 100% success rate.

Testing the engine directly on one 24 core server produced between 533,000 and 536,000 fully verified payments per second. Polygon then distributed the workload across 25 independently scaling hubs with 16 vCPUs each, where the system passed 11 million payment updates per second.

The figure does not mean Polygon Chain itself processed 11 million onchain transactions per second. Individual payment updates moved through the offchain channels, while deposited funds remained secured through Polygon and accumulated payment states were settled onchain in batches.

Polygon said its hubs partition payers and do not need to coordinate with each other while payments are being processed. Capacity can therefore be added by running more hubs. Based on the 25 hub test, the company estimates that a larger fleet could process more than 100 million payment updates per second.

Participants can determine when those accumulated payments are settled. Settlement could take place after one payment, 50,000 updates or 100 million updates, depending on how the service is configured.

The benchmark configuration put the processing cost for one billion payment updates at approximately $0.15, according to Polygon.

x402 payment activity is spreading across blockchain networks

Polygon's test arrives as x402 is being adopted across several blockchain ecosystems. Circle reported that USDC accounted for 99.3% of x402 payment volume measured during the second quarter, although the figure covered Circle's x402 data and did not represent all AI agent payment systems.

Network support has continued to grow. Cardano added x402 to its software stack in September, allowing developers to build agents and applications capable of paying for services with ADA and Cardano native tokens. Its initial TypeScript release had been tested on Cardano's preproduction environment but had not yet demonstrated commercial payments at scale on mainnet.

Block joined the x402 Foundation this week and contributed Lightning support to the protocol. The x402 Foundation reported 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million in volume over a recent 30 day period, while the Lightning addition gives developers a Bitcoin based payment option alongside the stablecoins that have supplied much of the protocol's activity.

Ripple has pursued a similar path around the XRP Ledger. AI agents had generated more than 1.4 million transactions on XRPL by July, while Ripple was working on developer infrastructure for autonomous payments involving XRP and RLUSD.

Agent payments fit Polygon's Open Money Stack plans

The agent pay channel system is expected to connect with Polygon's Open Money Stack, which brings together the infrastructure used to move funds into applications, hold them, apply spending rules and settle accumulated value.

Polygon has spent much of 2026 building its payments infrastructure around stablecoins and institutional settlement. PayPal USD became native on Polygon in July through the Open Money Stack, giving businesses access to PYUSD alongside wallets, fiat ramps and compliance tools. Polygon Labs said at the time that its network had settled more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions.

The network had already reduced its average block time to 1.75 seconds in May as part of its payments push, taking its estimated theoretical onchain throughput to roughly 3,260 transactions per second.

Agent pay channels use a different scaling model because millions of individual payment updates do not have to compete for that onchain transaction capacity. Funds are committed to the channel first, payment updates take place away from the chain, and Polygon records the resulting settlement in batches.

Polygon said the setup is intended for services that charge by individual API call, token, lookup or completed task, allowing an agent to move between providers without maintaining a separately funded prepaid account with each service.