How TLAY Is Building the Payment Layer for the Machine Economy

Two devices on a table. No humans in the loop. A payment every ten seconds.

The first device is an eCandle, a small solar energy device that broadcasts a live electricity price that fluctuates. The second is a Bitaxe, a compact bitcoin miner that needs power to operate.

Every ten seconds, the Bitaxe evaluates the current price. If buying power is profitable given its mining economics, it signs a USDC payment authorization on-device and consumes the electricity. The payment flows through Circle's infrastructure and settles on Arc Testnet. If the price isn't profitable, it waits and no API call is made.

No human approves the transaction. No custodial intermediary holds the funds. There are just two machines, a price signal, a decision, and settlement. Repeated autonomously every ten seconds.

This is not a concept; it ran live at the Arc Builder Spotlight on May 27, 2026. (You can also watch a shorter demo of the same concept.)

How TLAY enables machine-to-machine payments

TLAY is building the infrastructure layer that makes scenes like the one above possible at scale. It enables embedded wallets and trust primitives for machine-to-machine commerce.

The core insight behind TLAY's work is that the agentic economy is already here — autonomous devices and AI agents need to transact, but most existing payment rails weren't built for them.

Existing payment rails were designed for humans. They require accounts, approvals, custodians, and settlement windows that take hours or days. None of that is compatible with a device that needs to make a payment decision every ten seconds. TLAY's answer is to move the wallet — and the payment decision — onto the device itself.

TLAY's approach puts wallets directly on devices like the Bitaxe so it can authorize transactions on-device, without routing a payment request to a server that holds funds on its behalf. That turns the device into an economic actor.

This approach also changes the performance requirements. The settlement layer needs to be fast enough, cheap enough, and final enough that a ten-second payment cycle is operationally viable. This is where Arc's infrastructure becomes essential.

How Arc supports machine-to-machine payments

Arc's infrastructure properties map directly onto what machine-to-machine nanopayments require.

Sub-second deterministic finality

A payment that takes minutes to confirm is not useful in a system where decisions are made every ten seconds. Arc settles transactions with deterministic finality in under a second. For the Bitaxe, that means each payment is signed, submitted, and settled before the next pricing decision begins. Each transaction is discrete and final without the risk of creating a backlog. 

USDC-denominated gas

Nanopayments are, by definition, small. On chains where gas fees are paid in a volatile native token, the cost to transact can exceed the value of the transaction itself during periods of network congestion or token price appreciation. On Arc, gas is paid in stablecoins starting with USDC, which means the cost of each transaction is predictable, stable, and denominated in the same asset being transferred. There is no exposure to gas price volatility where a transaction becomes uneconomical because the gas token moved.

A stablecoin-native settlement layer

TLAY's devices transact in USDC today, but the infrastructure they're building is meant to support machine-to-machine commerce at scale. As that commerce grows, devices will need more than a payment channel — they'll need to interact with lending markets, manage collateral across chains, or integrate with yield infrastructure. Arc's composable asset stack, including EarnKit, Uniswap pools, and CCTP for crosschain USDC flows, means the ecosystem TLAY is building into is designed to support those needs as they develop, rather than requiring a migration to new infrastructure later.

What this means for the agentic economy on Arc

Many conversations about AI agents and autonomous payments today assume cloud infrastructure. We generally think of LLM-powered agents with API access to payment rails, making decisions programmatically on behalf of users. TLAY's demo pushes that framing further and makes it physical.

Physical hardware with embedded wallets introduces a category of machine-to-machine commerce that cloud-native frameworks don't address. The eCandle and Bitaxe demo is the simplest version of the pattern: one device produces something of value, another needs it, and they settle autonomously without a human or intermediary in the loop.

The same pattern applies to a sensor network paying for data relay, a charging station settling with an electric vehicle, or a manufacturing device purchasing compute time from a neighboring machine. Each is a device that needs to hold value, evaluate price signals, make autonomous decisions, and settle payments continuously — at frequencies that make traditional payment infrastructure impractical.

What the demo illustrates at a category level is that this kind of commerce is no longer hypothetical. The question for builders is what to build on top of it.

Arc proposes a blueprint for the agentic economy that frames this category of infrastructure as a core use case for the chain. TLAY is the first team to demonstrate it working with physical AI and autonomous machines on Arc Testnet.

Watch the demo and build with TLAY on Arc

The full Builder Spotlight session, including Leo's walkthrough of the architecture and live demo, is available to watch at the Arc community hub.

Visit TLAY's website to learn more about embedded wallet and machine commerce infrastructure.

For builders interested in the agentic economy infrastructure on Arc, visit the Arc docs and join the Arc Discord to connect with the team and ecosystem.