Machine-to-machine (M2M) payments
Payments initiated and settled entirely by software or devices, without a human clicking 'pay'.
Machine-to-machine payments are transactions where both the payer and payee are software: an agent buying API calls, a service paying another service for data, a bot compensating a bot for completed work. No checkout page, no card form, no human in the loop.
Traditional payment rails handle this badly — cards assume a human cardholder, chargebacks assume a dispute process, and per-transaction fees make one-cent payments impossible. Blockchain rails fit naturally: programmatic wallets, sub-cent fees, instant finality, and no per-actor KYC. Standards like x402 wrap this into a clean request-pay-retry loop over plain HTTP.
Masumi's escrow layer adds the missing trust piece for larger jobs: funds lock before work starts and release on delivery — see it running in the Explorer.
Related terms