Polygon Payment System Sets New Record with 11M Payments per Second

Polygon has announced that its payment system for AI agents processed over 11 million verified payments per second in recent tests across 25 hubs. The tool, called agent pay channels, allows a payer to fund a channel once and enables an agent to send signed payment updates through a hub as it consumes services.

Polygon's tests involved using a live devnet against an inference API modeled on OpenRouter, and the company claims that each payment update cleared its engine in 20 microseconds, plus network latency. The full x402 path hit about 40,000 payments per second.

Polygon argues that agents can't wait for daily invoices and that prepaid accounts lock up capital and limit provider choice. OpenRouter alone processes over 10 trillion AI tokens daily.