Hedera

Every purchase Pocket allows ends as a real stablecoin transfer with a public receipt.

Why it suits agent payments

Fees are tiny and predictable. An agent buying data at a cent a call cannot absorb a variable fee market. A purchase that costs more to settle than the thing being bought is not a purchase.

It settles in seconds. The demo's full round trip, including the decision, lands in about two seconds. An agent waiting on a confirmation is an agent not doing its job.

Stablecoin is native. USDC exists as a first-class token, so there is no contract to special-case.

Your agent needs no gas

A facilitator pays the network fee. Your agent's wallet holds only the stablecoin it spends, and never needs topping up with a second token.

That removes a whole class of failure: an agent stuck mid-task because nobody noticed a gas balance ran out.

Pocket never broadcasts anything. It produces a partly signed transaction that the facilitator has to co-sign, so a compromised Pocket still cannot move money on its own.

Wallets opt into tokens

Hedera asks an account to opt into a token before it can hold it. Pocket does this when it creates the wallet, not at the first payment, so a funded wallet is never in a state where money sent to it would bounce.

You do not have to do anything. It is worth knowing only because it explains why wallet creation takes a moment longer than you might expect.

One consequence does reach you. An account created by an incoming transfer has never signed anything, so the network cannot see its public key — and some faucets refuse to send to an account in that state while reporting success anyway. Pocket can still pay from it, and a single button fixes it for everyone else. See funding a wallet.

A receipt

PAID       0.01 USDC
tx         0.0.7162784@1788896248.263006462
explorer   hashscan.io/testnet/transaction/0.0.7162784@1788896248...

The transaction begins with the facilitator's account, because the facilitator is the payer of record for the fee.