Circle: Inside the $50K Agentic Economy Prize

​Your agent can reason, plan, and execute — but the moment it needs to pay for something, a human still has to step in and click "pay." That gap is exactly what's standing between an AI agent and an AI agent that runs a business.

​In this live session, the team at Circle breaks down what it actually takes to let AI agents transact on their own — initiating or settling payments within set rules and limits, agent-to-agent, agent-to-service, or agent-to-merchant, with no human in the loop. We'll get into what's already live, what's still being figured out, and what builders consistently get wrong when they treat agentic payments as a feature to bolt on later instead of a foundation to build around.

​For context, Circle is the company behind USDC, one of the most widely used stablecoins in the world. As a publicly traded, fully regulated issuer with its own end-to-end stack — from issuing the stablecoin to settling the transaction — Circle has a level of infrastructure control that few other payments players, including Stripe and Coinbase, can match. That makes them one of the clearest windows into what agentic payments will actually look like at scale.

​This session also introduces the $50K Agentic Economy Prize, presented in partnership with Circle, exclusively for Build with Gemini XPRIZE participants. $50,000 goes to the startup team that best demonstrates AI agents autonomously making or receiving payments as a core part of their business. To win, a team must show real agent-driven transactions — the agent pays or gets paid on its own within set rules, it's central to how the business works, and it runs live (or on testnet with a clear path to production), not as a demo.

​Register to compete: https://www.geminixprize.com/agentic-payments

​If you're building anything that touches money — agent-to-agent, agent-to-service, or agent-to-merchant — and want to know exactly what it takes to win the Agentic Payments Prize, this is the session that shows you how.

​NOTE: The Agentic Economy Prize is independently funded, administered, and judged by Circle. It is not a judged category of the Build with Gemini XPRIZE, and XPRIZE and Devpost play no role in evaluating submissions. Eligible participants may opt in during their Build with Gemini XPRIZE submission; full rules and judging criteria will be published by Circle