Circle: From Demo to Deployed — Building a Paying Agent Live
Your agent can reason, plan, and execute. Then it hits a paywall — and waits for a human to click "pay."
Last session, Circle's team explained what it takes to close that gap (click here if you missed it!). This session, they close it in front of you.
Harshal Bhangale and Danny Organ are back with two things. First, 'Steve' — Circle's own experiment in letting a fleet of autonomous agents make real decisions with real money in live markets, no human in the loop. What held up, what broke, and what surprised them.
Then they build. Live, from scratch: using Circle’s CLI and Marketplace with your favorite coding agents like Claude or Cursor give your agent with its own wallet and its own spending rules, wiring it to a common use case, and deploying it end to end with Circle's stack
No slideware. A working agent that pays for what it uses, built in the time it takes to watch.
What we'll cover
- 'Steve' in the open — what Circle learned running autonomous agents with actual money at stake
- A live build — an agent with its own wallet, its own limits, deployed end to end
- The first use case most builders reach for — and how to wire it up in a weekend
- The guardrail pattern — spending caps, per-service limits, allowlists, time-bounded sessions — that makes autonomous spending safe enough to ship
- The mistakes that sink these features — starting with treating payments as an add-on instead of a foundation
What you'll leave with
- A clear picture of the shortest path from "my agent works" to "my agent pays"
- A reference build you can retrace in your own project this week
- A concrete sense of what separates a real agentic payment flow from a demo with a human behind it
- A read on what Circle's judges are actually looking for
This session orbits around the $50K Agentic Economy Prize, presented in partnership with Circle, exclusively for Build with Gemini XPRIZE participants. $50,000 goes to the startup team that best demonstrates AI agents autonomously making or receiving payments as a core part of their business. To win, a team must show real agent-driven transactions — the agent pays or gets paid on its own within set rules, it's central to how the business works, and it runs live (or on testnet with a clear path to production), not as a demo.
Register to compete: https://www.geminixprize.com/agentic-payments
If you're building anything that touches money — agent-to-agent, agent-to-service, or agent-to-merchant — and want to know exactly what it takes to win the Agentic Payments Prize, this is the session that shows you how.
NOTE: The Agentic Economy Prize is independently funded, administered, and judged by Circle. It is not a judged category of the Build with Gemini XPRIZE, and XPRIZE and Devpost play no role in evaluating submissions. Eligible participants may opt in during their Build with Gemini XPRIZE submission; full rules and judging criteria will be published by Circle
