An AI agent on Algorand can now buy a trust check with a signature alone: fee zero, no ALGO in its wallet, settled in real USDC. Here is how the pooled-fee trick works, and the mainnet receipts from the day we turned it on.
The Buyer Pays Nothing, and That Is the Whole Point
Every payment rail we run starts from the same requirement: the agent doing the buying should sign, and someone else should carry the transaction. On the EVM chains that takes EIP-3009, a per-token standard the token contract has to implement. On Stellar it takes a Soroban authorization entry. Algorand turned out to have the cleanest answer of the three, because it is built into the protocol itself: transactions travel in atomic groups, and the network only checks that the fees of the WHOLE group cover its cost.
So the agent signs a USDC transfer with a fee of exactly zero, a fee-payer transaction joins it in the same group, and the group either lands together or not at all. The buyer needs USDC and nothing else: no ALGO for gas, no wrapped anything, no approval dance. When the x402 challenge comes back with a price, the whole checkout is one signature.
That is what x402 v2 calls the exact scheme on AVM, and it is live on this product today: GET any tool under /api/x402/algorand/tools and the 402 that answers carries the price, the asset and exactly what to sign.
Four Tools, Four Mainnet Receipts
We turned the rail on and bought from ourselves the same day, once per tool, because a price list is a claim and a receipt is a fact. verify_agent settled for 0.001 USDC in transaction YNNA54CX, round 64547231. reputation_score followed at 0.002, risk_check at 0.005, agent_passport at 0.01. Four tools, four transactions on Algorand mainnet, each one a fee-zero transfer signed by the buyer and carried by the facilitator.
The production deployment sells the same way: its first durable settlement is already in the log, and the whole trail, from the Stellar treasury that funded the operating accounts to the sale itself, is published at a-identity.xyz/proof/algorand with every transaction linked.
Both sides of those first payments are ours, and the proof page says so in its own caveats. They are evidence the rail works end to end, not evidence of demand; demand is what the receipts make it possible to earn.
No Payment Counts Until We Read It Ourselves
Settlement on this rail runs through the GoPlausible facilitator, the one the Algorand ecosystem standardized on. We still refuse to outsource the truth. Before the facilitator sees a payment group, we decode every transaction in it locally: the right asset, the right recipient, the right amount, nothing rekeying an account, nothing closing one out. And after the facilitator reports success, nothing is served until our own indexer read returns the transfer with a confirmed round and matching fields.
A facilitator saying settled is a claim about their process. The indexer read is a fact about the ledger. The gap between those two sentences is where paid services quietly become trust-me services, and this rail was built to never cross it.
The Same Budget, in a Third Language
The AgentSpendPolicy vault, the contract that gives an agent a budget it cannot exceed, now exists in Solidity, in Rust for Soroban, and in Algorand Python. Application 3688854723 holds real USDC on Algorand mainnet under the same rules as its siblings: one USDC per UTC day, 0.25 per payment, an allowlist, a freeze switch, and no update, delete or owner-transfer path. The constructor ran once and the rules are permanent.
We walked it through the same ladder the Stellar releases record. An under-limit payment of 0.05 USDC settled. A 0.50 attempt was refused with the contract's own ABOVE_AUTO_APPROVE. Frozen, the operator was refused with FROZEN while the owner paid through, and the day counter read back exactly 0.06 spent. On Algorand a refusal fails in simulation and never reaches the ledger, so refusals have no transaction hash; what makes them typed is the committed ARC-56 source map, which resolves the failing program counter to the assert label, reproducible by anyone against the live app for free.
What This Unlocks
Algorand named 2026 the year of agentic commerce, and the pieces fit ours with almost no translation: their facilitator moves the money, our oracle answers whether the counterparty deserves it, and the vault enforces what the answer is allowed to cost. An agent on Algorand can now check an identity, read a reputation, screen a risk and fetch a passport, each for less than a cent, each gasless, each settled in the dollar it already holds.
The registry entry, the code, the receipts and every caveat are public. Start at a-identity.xyz/proof/algorand and click anything; that is what it is for.