Skip to main content

​
Why we built The Grid

Agents do not transact like humans. A single user prompt can fan out into hundreds of paid calls: a search, a model invocation, a few API hits, a stream of tokens metered per character. Each one is worth a fraction of a cent and needs to settle inside the same round-trip as the request that triggered it. Card rails were never designed for that traffic shape, and they price every transaction as if a person authorized it. General-purpose blockchains are closer, but they were built for a different workload: a smaller number of higher-value transfers, denominated in a volatile native token, finalized in seconds to minutes. Pay a few cents in gas to move a few cents of value, wait several blocks for confirmation, and ask an agent to retry on reorg. The model breaks before it starts. The Grid treats high-frequency, low-value, machine-initiated payments as the primary workload, not an edge case. Fees, finality, and the developer surface are all chosen for that target.

​
Claims to Fame

​
Sub-cent cost

A payment on the Grid costs a fraction of a cent, including the network fee. That makes per-call billing for an API, per-token billing for an LLM, or per-byte billing for a data feed economically real instead of a rounding error you eat or batch around.

​
Sub-second deterministic finality

Settlement completes inside the same HTTP round-trip as the request that triggered it. Finality is deterministic. Once a payment is finalized it cannot be reverted. So an agent and the service it is paying can both move on without watching for reorgs.

​
Stablecoin-denominated fees

Fees are quoted and paid in stablecoins. There is no separate volatile gas token to acquire, hedge, or top up. The price you see when you build is the price you pay when you ship, and an agent’s spending budget is denominated in the same currency as the work it is paying for.

​
Who the Grid is for

The Grid is built for the people and systems moving money on behalf of agents:
  • Agent developers building autonomous software that pays for tools, APIs, data, or compute.
  • Agent operators and platforms funding agents, setting spending limits, and reconciling activity.
  • Merchants and API providers accepting agent traffic and pricing it per call, per token, or per session.
  • Wallet and infrastructure teams integrating payments, delegations, and streamed settlement into agent-facing products.
The Grid is not built as a general-purpose L1 competing for DeFi, NFT, or game deployments. If you are shopping for the next EVM-compatible chain for an arbitrary on-chain application, the Grid is the wrong tool. The execution model, the fee model, and the developer surface are all optimized for one workload: high-frequency machine payments.

​
Next steps