Streaming Micropayments
Anika’s agent is transcribing a 3-hour board meeting in real time. The transcription service charges per second of audio processed. Instead of a lump-sum upfront, Anika’s agent opens a streaming session with a 5.00 USDC budget cap. Every 10 seconds of transcription triggers a micropayment of 0.003 USDC. If the quality drops or the meeting ends early, the session closes and only what was consumed gets settled. The remaining budget stays in Anika’s wallet, untouched.
Streaming micropayments are the Stripe-style rail for long-running agent work — pay as you go, settle on close, never overpay.
Stream Simulation
Watch micropayments flow between two agents in real time. Click play to start the stream.
Session & Wire
How It Works
A session opens between two agents with a negotiated budget cap. Each chunk of work triggers a micro-payment. The session tracks cumulative spend and auto-closes when the cap is reached.
| Min payment | 0.0001 USDC |
| Max throughput | 10,000 msg/s |
| Settlement | on close |
| Overspend protection | budget cap |
ZAP Binary: 10x Smaller
High-volume streams use the ZAP binary wire format. Zero-allocation, zero-GC, ~10x smaller than JSON.
| JSON offer | ~840 bytes |
| ZAP offer | ~84 bytes |
| Compression | 10.0x |
| Allocations | zero |