The Settlement Layer
for the Agent Economy
Aggregate millions of agent payments into deterministic net settlement. No new chain. No protocol changes. One endpoint.
Logical TPS
0+
Compression Ratio
0:1
Cost per Txn
$0.000000
Gas Saved
$0K+
An Open Clearing Infrastructure for the Agent Economy
Stratum enables deterministic clearing for AI-native payments. No new chain. No protocol changes. One integration endpoint.
The Problem
AI agents will generate 1M+ payments per second. Current chains can’t clear that.
Stripe’s 2025 Annual Letter identified the core constraint: blockchains need to support 1M–1B transactions per second for the agent economy. At $0.005 gas per call, that’s $432M/day in fees alone.
The answer isn’t a faster chain. It’s a clearinghouse — the same infrastructure that powers every high-volume financial system.
Step 1
The chaos
0
API calls / 5 min
AI agents generate millions of API calls per second. Today, every single one is a separate on-chain transaction — $5,000/sec in gas.
Without Stratum
- ×Every API call = an on-chain transaction
- ×$5,000/sec in gas fees
- ×Chain congestion → 35× fee spikes
- ×Every payment publicly visible
- ×Single chain dependency
- ×Single point of failure
With Stratum
- ✓1M calls settle as ~20 transfers
- ✓$0.25/sec in gas fees (99.99% less)
- ✓Payments clear instantly off-chain
- ✓Only net settlements visible (private)
- ✓Works on any chain
- ✓Facilitator-agnostic
Every high-volume financial system has a clearinghouse.
150M txns/day
Visa
Doesn’t send 150M bank wires. Nets and batches into a fraction.
$2.4Q/year
DTCC
Clears securities without moving the full value. Net settlement only.
1M+ payments/sec
Stratum
Compresses to <50 on-chain settlements. The clearinghouse for x402.
The agent economy needs the same infrastructure. Stratum is that infrastructure.
Integration so easy it feels wrong
No blockchain knowledge. No code changes. No SDK. Real endpoint in 30 seconds.
Under the hood
Four cryptographic primitives, composed into a clearing pipeline.
Cryptographic Receipts
Every payment generates an Ed25519-signed receipt with canonical encoding. Tamper-proof, deterministic, independently verifiable.
Append-Only Merkle Tree
Receipts are stored in an RFC 6962-compliant tree. Inclusion and consistency proofs let anyone verify the full audit trail.
Multilateral Netting
Aggregate net positions across all agents. Greedy matching pairs creditors with debtors to produce the minimum transfer set.
Chain Anchoring
One Merkle root per settlement window, anchored on Solana. The bridge from off-chain clearing to on-chain finality.
For Facilitators
We make you 1,000,000× more efficient
Stratum doesn't replace facilitators — it supercharges them. Instead of processing 500K individual x402 settlements per week, you receive 50 batch instructions.
Integrate as facilitator →Trust and verification
Stratum is designed so you don't have to trust Stratum.
Trusted
Stratum is trusted to clear correctly. The gateway signs receipts and computes netting. Operators can run their own clearing node for full independence.
- Receipt signing
- Netting computation
- Window management
Verified
Every receipt, Merkle proof, and settlement batch is independently verifiable by any third party. Explorer provides real-time verification.
- Ed25519 signatures
- Merkle inclusion proofs
- Consistency proofs
On-Chain
Settlement instructions are executed by the facilitator. Merkle roots are anchored on Solana. Finality is on-chain.
- USDC transfers via facilitator
- Merkle root anchoring
- On-chain audit trail