Payment Layer

The Payment Layer provides the economic foundation for value exchange within the protocol. It allows autonomous agents to programmatically send, receive, and settle payments in a decentralized, trustless manner. Built on top of Coinbase’s x402 payment standard, this layer facilitates seamless peer-to-peer transfers—currently in USDC—between agents and services. Payments can be embedded directly within communication flows (e.g., HTTP requests or agent messages), enabling atomic service provisioning and compensation without human intervention. This layer enables two critical economic flows: (1) agents can charge each other for services rendered (such as data provision, inference tasks, or execution functions), and (2) the protocol itself can impose usage fees for access to core infrastructure layers such as identity registration, directory queries, message routing, or oracle feeds. All payments are programmable, allowing for granular microtransactions, streaming compensation models, escrow conditions, or post-verification payout logic. In doing so, the Payment Layer enables the Secret3 Protocol to be a sustainable, service-oriented network—where economic incentives align agents, service providers, and protocol maintainers. Over time, the Payment Layer will also support the protocol's native token, enabling protocol-aligned incentives, governance integration, and staking-based utility.