On October 9, Ant Digital Technologies and HSBC completed a technical verification of AI agent micro-payments in Hong Kong. The test demonstrated a process in which an AI agent discovers and invokes digital services, initiates a payment, and then HSBC conducts real-time risk verification and settlement.

Micro-payments typically refer to small transactions below $2, but the specific payment amount in this test was not disclosed.

It is understood that this test used HSBC's tokenized deposit service, Ant Digital Technologies' Anvita Flow network, and the Jovay testnet, and remains at the technical exploration stage.

Bian Zhuoqun, President of Blockchain Business at Ant Digital Technologies, stated that this technical verification with HSBC demonstrates the potential uses of on-chain AI agents, and Ant Digital Technologies will continue to explore the application of autonomous agents in real commercial scenarios.

Lewis Sun, Global Head of Digital Currencies at HSBC, said that HSBC hopes to enhance customer experience and reduce transaction friction through its tokenized deposit service and new application partnerships, while paying attention to customer needs, exercising appropriate control, and pursuing responsible development.

Protocols and transaction activity already exist for small payments between machines.

As of April this year, the x402 protocol had accumulated an adjusted transaction volume of approximately $15 million, involving about 109.6 million transactions. The Machine Payments Protocol launched by Stripe and Tempo also completed approximately $25,000 in settlements within weeks of going live.

These attempts reflect a new type of demand: software paying another software for a single API call or a small segment of computing power. The smaller the transaction amount and the higher the frequency, the more automation is needed for fees, reconciliation, and risk assessment.

The specific incremental value of this verification by Ant Digital Technologies and HSBC is enabling agents to autonomously complete service invocation and payment on behalf of users or enterprises, and integrating the bank's real-time risk verification into the same process.

This differs from the aforementioned pure machine-to-machine protocols. According to HSBC, its tokenized deposit service can represent corporate deposits as on-chain digital certificates (with a 1:1 correspondence to deposit accounts), supporting round-the-clock, near-real-time transfers within the HSBC network. The service has already launched in Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates.

This test places service invocation and bank settlement into the same technical process. Whether it can lead to practical applications in the future will depend on how digital service provider onboarding, transaction costs, and agent authorization rules develop.