AutoPay Protocol

AutoPay is a non-custodial recurring payment protocol for USDC subscriptions on EVM chains. Subscribers approve a smart contract once, define spending limits, and receive automatic charges at fixed intervals. No intermediary holds funds between payments.

The core is the PolicyManager contract, deployed on Arbitrum, Flow EVM mainnet, and Base mainnet. A subscriber creates a policy with four parameters: merchant address, charge amount, billing interval, and spending cap. The first charge executes atomically within the creation transaction. Subsequent charges are triggered by an offchain relayer that calls charge() when payments come due. The contract enforces every constraint onchain. If the relayer misbehaves or disappears, it cannot move funds outside the terms the subscriber agreed to. After three consecutive failed charges, anyone can cancel the policy permissionlessly.

Subscribers fund their wallet from 30+ chains through LI.FI. Arbitrum gives AutoPay low-cost gas, deep USDC liquidity, a mature DeFi ecosystem, and the largest L2 user base — the ideal settlement layer for recurring payments at scale. Plan metadata is stored on IPFS with Filecoin persistence via Storacha. When a merchant publishes a plan, the terms are snapshotted and the CID is stored onchain in the policy's metadata URL. If AutoPay disappears, the record of what a subscriber agreed to remains content-addressed and verifiable. This extends to charge receipts and merchant reports. Monthly revenue data is persisted via Storacha, creating a Filecoin-backed financial audit trail any third-party system can ingest. Filecoin as a financial integrity layer, not file storage.

For merchants, integration is an npm install. The SDK (@autopayprotocol/sdk) exposes Stripe-style webhook events (charge.succeeded, charge.failed, policy.revoked, policy.cancelled_by_failure) so existing backend patterns carry over directly. The relayer is self-hostable: a merchant can run their own instance, owning the entire charging infrastructure. No vendor lock-in, no platform risk.

AutoPay is also built for agentic commerce. An agent middleware layer and MCP server allow any LLM or autonomous agent to create checkouts, manage subscriptions, query policy state, and verify receipts against IPFS — programmatically, without a UI. Today the only option for crypto-native agent payments is per-request models like x402. AutoPay gives agents recurring economic relationships onchain, the billing primitive the autonomous agent economy needs but doesn't have.

The public goods angle is direct. Open-source maintainers, protocol teams, and DAOs depend on grants. Grants end. AutoPay provides permissionless recurring revenue for the commons. No gatekeepers, no deplatforming risk, half the cost of Stripe. Gitcoin does one-off rounds. AutoPay does sustainable monthly funding.

The protocol is open-source. Smart contracts are verified onchain. The relayer, SDK, and frontend are public repositories. Operating costs on L2 are low enough to run sustainably on protocol fees alone, with no token.

AutoPay is live on mainnet today. The SDK is on npm. The relayer is indexing events, executing charges, and delivering webhooks. IPFS metadata and receipts work via Storacha. The agent middleware and MCP server are built. This is deployed, functional, decentralised payments infrastructure — now expanding to Arbitrum as its primary settlement layer.