Autonomous AI agents are turning into real economic actors on the internet, not just tools that humans point at things. They browse the web, hit APIs, rent compute, buy data, and consume services. What they can’t do yet is pay for any of it natively. Someone still has to set up billing ahead of time, hand out API keys, or approve every charge.

HoodLayer is the payment infrastructure built for exactly this shift. It gives agents a single on-chain mechanism for one-time payments and recurring subscriptions alike, with no permission required, everything out in the open, and Robinhood Chain’s speed and cost: an Arbitrum Orbit Ethereum L2 targeting ~100ms block times, with near-instant sequencer confirmation and fees well under a cent per transaction.

What HoodLayer provides

For AI agent developers, HoodLayer lets your agents pay for services on their own, with no human in the loop and no fragile workarounds. An agent can read pricing from any HoodLayer-compatible service, sign up for a subscription on-chain, and let billing take care of itself from there.

For service providers, HoodLayer is a billing layer that handles agent traffic natively. Publish a pricing plan on-chain, drop a middleware gate in front of your API, and start charging human and agent clients alike, with no API keys to manage and no invoices to chase.

Key capabilities

Capability	Description
One-time payments	Per-request payments over the x402-compatible flow
Subscription plans	Plans live in an on-chain registry and renew on their own
Allowances	Spend caps that meter usage-based billing
Payment sessions	Session tokens for high-frequency use, settled in batches (coming in GA)
Webhooks	Structured lifecycle events delivered to your own infrastructure

How it works

HoodLayer sits in the middle, between agents and the services they pay. A provider publishes its pricing plans to the on-chain HoodLayer Plan Registry. When an agent asks for a paid resource, the service answers with a 402 Payment Required plus the relevant plan terms. Through the HoodLayer SDK, the agent reads those terms, authorizes the payment or subscription on-chain, and gets access.

The complete picture is laid out in Architecture.

What HoodLayer is not

HoodLayer is not a wallet, and it’s not a stablecoin or a layer-1 blockchain either. It’s billing infrastructure, meant to live alongside the wallets, tokens, and services you already have. Think Stripe rather than any blockchain protocol.

Standards compatibility

HoodLayer implements x402 as a first-class citizen. That’s the HTTP-native payment protocol Coinbase started in May 2025, now run by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation, with Google, Visa, Stripe, AWS, Mastercard, Microsoft, Shopify, and Circle among the participants. HoodLayer is also built to stay compatible with MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), the IETF-tracked standard that Stripe and Tempo published in March 2026. More detail lives in x402 Compatibility and MPP Compatibility.

Get started

Building an AI agent that should be able to pay for services on its own:

1. Start with the Quickstart
2. Install the Agent SDK
3. Read up on Plans and Subscriptions

Running a service and want to take payments from agents:

1. Start with the Quickstart
2. Install the Provider SDK
3. Create a plan and wire up the payment gate middleware

Beta scope

HoodLayer is in public beta. Available today: one-time payments through the x402 flow, subscription plans, fixed allowances, the TypeScript SDK, the HoodLayer Dashboard, and USDC on Robinhood Chain mainnet. For the duration of the beta, HoodLayer runs the Facilitator as a centralized service.

Protocol fees come to 0.5% of transaction value on one-time payments, 0.3% per settled subscription billing cycle, and 0.2% of session volume. Listing in the Plan Registry costs nothing while the beta lasts.

Payment sessions, a Python SDK, the decentralized facilitator network, USDT support, and cross-chain support are all planned for general availability and later.