Light Paper: Grindery Wallet
Introduction
The Agentic Web is the next stage of the internet: instead of humans clicking through interfaces, autonomous agents will carry out tasks on our behalf. These agents will plan, negotiate, and transact with other agents, unlocking entirely new ways for software to work for us. The shift is already underway, as major technology companies adopt agent frameworks and research increasingly shows how multi-agent systems can transform everything from enterprise automation to consumer services.
But to make the Agentic Web real, a host of challenges need to be solved. Agents must discover and trust one another, interoperate across open protocols, and stay safe under human oversight. They need ways to share context, attribute actions, and prove accountability. And critically, they must be able to exchange value reliably and at scale — because without payments, there is no economy to sustain their work.
This is where today's infrastructure falls short. Fiat payment systems, especially credit cards, are completely unsuited to agent-scale activity. They are too slow — settlement takes days, not milliseconds. They are too expensive — a fixed fee of $0.20 to $0.30 per transaction makes it impossible to pay for a $0.002 service call. And they are optimized for large, infrequent human purchases, not the rapid-fire, machine-to-machine interactions the Agentic Web depends on.
Recognizing this gap, many blockchain protocols and wallet solutions have emerged with the goal of enabling micropayments. Yet they stumble on the same hurdles. Settlement-first models force every transaction to wait for block confirmation, adding seconds of latency where only milliseconds are tolerable. Even "cheap" networks charge fees larger than the value of most agent calls, breaking the economics. Channel-based systems require capital to be locked up and pre-negotiated, which doesn't work in a world where agents constantly interact with new providers. And approaches like probabilistic or streaming payments fit narrow use cases but fail for the heterogeneous, disputable tasks agents actually perform.
What is needed is a new kind of wallet — one designed specifically for the Agentic Web. Its vision is clear: enable agents to transact at machine speed, with costs that shrink to near zero as usage scales, while giving users confidence that charges are controlled and reversible, and providers certainty that valid payments will be honored. To people and businesses, it should feel as seamless as today's toll systems or credit cards, integrating smoothly with existing billing and accounting processes. To agents, it should be invisible — a background layer that makes every micro-interaction economically viable.
Current Systems Not a Good Fit
For the Agentic Web to really work, we need wallets that clear five hurdles. First, the cost per transaction has to be basically zero, because many of these agent-to-agent calls are worth less than a cent. Second, payments have to authorize instantly, in milliseconds, otherwise chained workflows grind to a halt. Third, costs have to be traceable back through chains of agents so users don't get "bill shock" and providers know they'll get paid. Fourth, it has to work in the normal world, where people don't want to mess with seed phrases or gas tokens — ideally the blockchain part is invisible. And fifth, it has to be simple for developers to drop into their apps, like Stripe is today.
Now, when you look at existing wallet solutions and payment approaches, each one falls down somewhere.
Traditional wallets (MetaMask, Trust Wallet, etc.) require users to manage gas, sign every transaction, and wait for on-chain confirmation. That's fine for DeFi trading but completely breaks for agent billing where you need instant authorization for thousands of micro-transactions.
Smart contract wallets (Safe, Argent) add better UX with social recovery and gas abstraction, but they're still transaction-focused. Every action needs explicit approval or pre-configuration. There's no native concept of credit limits, spending scopes, or batch billing that agents require.
Embedded wallet solutions (Circle WaaS, Coinbase Wallet SDK) handle the key management but still operate on a transaction-by-transaction basis. They don't solve the fundamental problem: waiting for blockchain settlement and paying per-transaction fees that exceed the value being exchanged.
Take on-chain settle-before-service — the simplest model, where every micro-payment is written to the blockchain before the service runs. That works fine if you don't mind paying a few cents per transaction and waiting a few seconds, but that breaks as soon as you're dealing with sub-cent agent calls that need to run in real time.
State channels (like Raiden or Connext) were designed to make lots of payments back and forth between the same two parties cheap and instant. Great if you're Uber paying a driver 1,000 times a day, but in the Agentic Web, agents are constantly talking to new services. Channels break down because you can't open one with everyone on the fly.
Payment channel networks like Lightning extend channels so you can route across a graph of connections. That makes sense for peer-to-peer Bitcoin payments, but not for agents firing off thousands of tiny, traceable calls. Routing can be slow or unreliable, liquidity fees stack up, and there's no clean way to carry attribution metadata through.
When you step back, the pattern is clear: every one of these systems either fails the cost and latency test, or it can't handle attribution and user protection, or it's too hard to integrate outside the crypto bubble. And whenever you try to "fix" them, you end up bolting on credit scopes, dispute windows, task IDs, batching, fiat ramps, and a developer-friendly API — in other words, you end up building an entirely new system.
Grindery Wallet: A New Approach
Grindery Wallet is built from the ground up for the Agentic Web. At its heart, the idea is simple: create digital wallets with native support for credit-card style, zero-latency, low-cost nano-transactions.
When an agent wants to act, it shouldn't need to wait for money to move on-chain or through a bank. Instead, the wallet checks in real time whether the agent has a valid credit scope or balance, logs the intent to charge, and lets the task run instantly. The actual movement of funds happens later, in large batches, once the dust has settled and users have had the chance to dispute or reject invalid charges.
This is the same principle that makes credit cards and electronic toll systems work in the physical world. You tap, you go — the clearing and reconciliation happen afterwards. Grindery Wallet brings that model to the digital economy, but tuned for the scale and precision the Agentic Web demands.
How It Works
Scoped Credit: Each Grindery Wallet comes with built-in credit management. Users pre-fund a small balance or extend a limited credit line. They authorize agents with spending scopes — caps, rate limits, purposes, and expiry. This ensures autonomy is bounded and revocable.
Instant Authorization: When a charge request comes in, the wallet checks authorization records cached in memory in milliseconds. If valid, the service executes immediately. No waiting for blockchain confirmation.
Tamper-Evident Logging: Each charge is recorded in the wallet's append-only ledger. It binds the principal, the provider, the task ID, and the metering evidence, so charges can always be attributed and audited.
Dispute Window: Users have a set period to reject unwanted charges through their wallet interface. This provides the same safety net as chargebacks, but in a lightweight and programmable way.
Batch Settlement: Accepted charges are netted and settled together on-chain. Instead of thousands of blockchain transactions, one settlement moves all funds, driving per-call costs effectively to zero.
Native Wallet Features
Unlike traditional wallets that just hold keys and sign transactions, Grindery Wallets have billing intelligence built in:
Credit Limits: Set spending caps per agent, per day, or per task type — just like credit card limits but programmable.
Spending Scopes: Define what agents can spend on, when, and with whom. Scopes cascade through agent chains while maintaining attribution.
Usage Analytics: Built-in dashboards show spending patterns, agent activity, and cost breakdowns — no external tools needed.
Dispute Management: Review and reject charges directly in the wallet UI, with automatic reconciliation.
Multi-Currency Support: While optimized for USDC, wallets can hold and transact in any supported token, with automatic conversion at point of sale.
Solving the Core Problems
With this integrated design, Grindery Wallet directly addresses the hardest problems of the Agentic Web:
Cost of Micro-Transactions
Because all charges are logged locally and only settled in batches on-chain, the cost per individual call approaches zero. A thousand agent-to-agent calls can be cleared with the same single settlement fee. This finally makes sub-cent interactions economically viable.
Latency at Scale
Authorization is handled by the wallet's local credit check that takes milliseconds. An agent chain with ten or even a hundred steps runs without noticeable delay, because none of the calls wait for on-chain settlement.
Cascading Billing and Attribution
Every charge carries the principal, the task ID, and the agent scope that triggered it. The wallet maintains the full attribution chain. Even if an agent delegates work to another agent, which delegates again, the costs remain traceable back to the original user.
Non-Crypto World Compatibility
With account abstraction built in, users don't need to manage keys, seed phrases, or gas tokens. They can top up balances in familiar ways — via card, bank transfer, or stable payment rails — while the wallet handles everything behind the scenes. To the end user, it feels like a normal payment app.
Ease of Integration
For developers, Grindery Wallet provides a simple API — like Stripe for agents. Instead of managing wallets, gas, and settlements, they just make API calls to charge users. The wallet handles authorization, scope enforcement, disputes, and settlement automatically.
Implementation
Grindery Wallets integrate smoothly with existing billing systems — whether it's a simple paywall service or a SaaS provider's metering and invoicing stack. This should be as simple as making an API call: log a usage event, generate a charge entry, and let the wallet handle the rest. Developers don't build settlement logic, dispute handling, or multi-hop attribution — those come built into every Grindery Wallet.
Every user and agent gets a smart wallet to authorize charges and enforce limits. This doesn't feel like "crypto." Grindery's account abstraction stack makes it possible to provision wallets without seed phrases, let users top up with a card or bank account, and enforce spending scopes invisibly in the background. To the end user, it feels like loading a prepaid balance in a regular app; to the agent ecosystem, it provides a programmable wallet with native billing capabilities.
The wallet's settlement layer operates across low-cost L1s and L2s that already support stablecoins. Viable venues include Polygon (PoS and zkEVM), Arbitrum One or Nova, Base (Coinbase's L2), zkSync Era, BNB Chain / opBNB, and Optimism. Each offers cheap, high-throughput settlement and mature EVM compatibility. Beyond the EVM world, Solana stands out as a high-throughput USDC rail, already tapped by Visa pilots. Stellar and Celo (now an Ethereum L2) have long focused on remittances and payments, while XRP Ledger positions itself for cross-border bank rails.
All of these will come under pressure from Circle's Arc, Stripe's Tempo networks, and Google's recently announced Universal Ledger, which aim to make USDC and digital asset payments issuer-native. Grindery Wallets plug directly into those ecosystems, since the wallet is settlement-agnostic — it just needs a low-cost chain where USDC is native. The wallet intelligently routes settlements to the most efficient chain based on cost and speed.
Over time, Grindery could also deploy its own chain — either as a specialized L2 (like a validity rollup) or as an L3 sitting on top of a popular L2. Running as a dedicated layer brings two advantages: first, predictable ultra-low fees, since economics can be tuned for microtransactions rather than generalized DeFi traffic; and second, native billing opcodes, meaning batching, disputes, and attribution can be system calls instead of contracts. This reduces complexity for developers and guarantees performance at scale. Think of it as the "Stripe network" for agents, where the whole chain is optimized for credit-before-settlement billing.
The benefit of this flexible deployment strategy is twofold. In the near term, Grindery Wallets can ride existing chains and their liquidity — whether that's Polygon, Arbitrum Nova, or Base — to get adoption quickly. In the longer run, it can harden into its own app-chain or supernet/subnet (on Polygon Supernets, Avalanche Subnets, or Optimism's OP Stack), ensuring costs stay near zero even as agentic traffic grows to millions of transactions per second. That way, it doesn't just survive the coming wave of USDC-native payment rails from Circle, Stripe, and Google, but actually complements them by providing the missing billing intelligence that those raw networks lack.
Cross-Chain by Design
Grindery Wallets aren't tied to a single chain. They can hold balances and settle on any supported network: Polygon for low costs, Arbitrum for Ethereum compatibility, Base for Coinbase integration, or Solana for maximum throughput. The wallet abstracts away chain selection, automatically choosing the most efficient rail for each settlement batch.
This positions Grindery Wallets to work seamlessly with emerging USDC-native networks from Circle (Arc) and Stripe (Tempo). As these networks mature, Grindery Wallets will provide the missing billing intelligence layer they lack — the spending controls, attribution tracking, and dispute management that make agent economies possible.
Conclusion
The Agentic Web needs more than just another payment protocol or wallet solution. It needs wallets built specifically for how agents transact: millions of micro-interactions, instant authorization, traceable attribution, and user control.
Grindery Wallet provides exactly that. It's not a protocol you implement or infrastructure you deploy. It's a wallet your users already understand, with an API your developers can integrate in minutes. The credit-card style billing model is native to the wallet itself, not bolted on afterwards.
By combining smart wallets, credit management, and batch settlement into one seamless product, Grindery Wallet becomes the payment infrastructure for the Agentic Web — as fundamental as HTTP was for the Web itself. Simple for users, trivial for developers, and invisible to agents.