Stablecoin payments

Many buyers in the Machine Economy think in dollars, not in a network token. Tenzro Network lets people, agents and machines hold stablecoins and pay for services in them. TNZO still does the work underneath: it pays every network fee and settles every transaction on the ledger. The stablecoin is what the buyer holds and spends; TNZO is what the network settles in.

Holding and spending stablecoins

A buyer pays from a stablecoin it already holds, in an account it controls, on a chain Tenzro bridges: USDC, USDT or EURC, for example. Tenzro names every asset by its full chain-agnostic identifier (CAIP-19), not by a bare symbol, so a payment is always in the exact token on the exact chain it claims to be.

• Authorized by your keys. Every payment carries a signature from the paying account. Human accounts are rooted in a passkey, machine accounts in a TPM 2.0 or Secure Enclave key. See Hardware-rooted keys.
• Bounded by Terms. A delegated agent pays only inside the Terms its responsible party granted: the scope, the per-transaction and per-period limits, and the counterparties and chains it may pay on. Every payment entry point, including x402, MPP, the HTTP 402 gates and ACP card flows, checks those Terms before it pays, and a paused or revoked agent does not pay at all.
• Funded where you already hold it. You fund a payer by holding the stablecoin on a supported chain. There is no separate wallet provider to sign up with.

To set an agent up on a dollar budget:

1. Hold the stablecoin in an account you control on a chain Tenzro bridges.
2. Grant the agent Terms that name the asset, the chain, the limits and the counterparties it may pay.
3. Point the agent at a paid route. It answers each 402 over x402 or MPP, inside those Terms.

Paying for services in stablecoins

Every paid route on a Tenzro node accepts stablecoins over the two open HTTP 402 protocols:

For example, an agent calling POST /v1/chat/completions without a credential receives a 402 that includes a stablecoin option. It signs for the ceiling it is willing to pay, the node serves the completion, meters the tokens and captures only what was used.

A provider can price in TNZO, in a stablecoin or in both. Providers set prices with the same tools they use for TNZO pricing, and the compute price index gives both sides a common reference. See Compute claims and price index.

Gas and fees

Paying for a service in a stablecoin over x402 needs no TNZO. The buyer signs a transfer authorization, and the node's facilitator verifies it and settles it on the stablecoin's own chain.

Transactions on the Tenzro ledger itself pay gas in TNZO, under one EIP-1559-style fee market across every runtime. The base fee adjusts with demand, and part of it is burned. See Token economics.

Settlement underneath

Whichever asset the buyer holds, settlement looks the same to the network:

• The payment is a signed transaction from the paying account, ordered by consensus and final once its block is certified.
• The receipt the buyer gets names the settlement transaction, so it can be checked by anyone.
• Network fees are priced in dollars, and gas on the ledger is paid in TNZO. TNZO is governed by the Tenzro Foundation.

Each payee chooses what it holds: the stablecoin as it arrived, or TNZO. The network default is set by governance, and the payee overrides it for its own receipts. A route that cannot be built is refused, never silently settled in the other asset.

One settled payment is divided once, among the parties that earned it: the operator, the RPC provider that validates on its behalf where there is one, and the treasury, in the proportions governance sets. Small metered charges accumulate in a payment channel until they are worth settling, then settle on the Tenzro ledger, or on a secondary rail when the payee wants an asset the ledger does not carry. For paid HTTP responses, delivery versus payment makes paying and receiving the decryption key one event on the ledger.

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