DEVELOPER REFERENCE / DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW

How MachineTransfer works and what a payment costs

MachineTransfer is a proposed dedicated EVM payment network. MTR is its ERC20 payment token. The website and downloadable toolkit are public; the blockchain, token payments and DEX demonstration currently run locally only. There is no public token contract or live payment service yet.

A payment from request to receipt

The human chooses a service and authorizes a budget. The agent receives a quote with a known recipient, exact amount, asset and network. A trusted wallet controller checks the quote against the owner's policy. The API prepares an expiring payment instruction; it never receives the wallet's private key.

The wallet signs the recipient, amount, sender, chain, token contract, validity window and unique nonce. Changing any of those signed fields invalidates the signature. A wallet or separately funded relayer submits the instruction to the token contract. The contract checks the signature, expiry, unused nonce and balance, then deducts the signed gross MTR amount: 99% goes to the recipient and 1% to the treasury, with tax rounded down to whole base units. The merchant matches the recipient net transfer to its invoice, not the signed gross amount.

A transaction hash is not proof of a paid invoice. A production merchant must store invoice state, enforce one-time fulfillment, wait for its required finality and handle reorgs or failed transactions. That production merchant layer is still to be implemented.

Which contracts do what?

• AgentToken is the canonical MTR ledger. It implements standard transfers, allowances, Permit and exact signed payments. The local version has a fixed 1% transfer tax and no owner mint function, upgrade admin or emergency confiscation function.
• PaymentBatcher forwards separately signed transfers to one immutable token, without custody or allowances. A failed item reverts the entire batch; the submitting wallet pays gas.
• Signature checks support ordinary EVM wallets and ERC1271 smart wallets. Each authorization can execute once. On-chain cancellation can revoke an unused authorization, but cancellation can race a payment already in flight.
• The immutable issuance rule adds 5% of the previous supply for each completed 365-day epoch. Anyone may trigger settlement, up to 20 overdue epochs at a time. New tokens go to the fixed treasury, not automatically to all holders. It is supply inflation, not interest or a promise of value.
• The proposed genesis allocation is one billion MTR with 18 decimals. The selected genesis recipient and emission treasury are the user's existing MCRTPay receiving address, 0xB3201393ba3Ba0724C225A5f1EE4fB9ee24aeB21. The public MCRTPay configuration was verified on 2026-10-08. No MTR was issued or sent to that address, and it is not a deposit address for this website.
• The local DEX demo uses official Uniswap V2 factory and pair contracts with a worthless demo quote token. This proves a local swap works; it does not create a public market.
• A future Ethereum/BNB bridge needs separate reviewed contracts. Remote tokens must be backed by canonical MTR, with no second inflation mechanism. ERC20 compatibility by itself is not a bridge.

The contract cannot replace a lost treasury key. Wallet-control evidence and a recovery decision must precede irreversible production deployment. The selected address will not be silently changed to a different wallet or multisig.

What does sending cost?

MTR transfer tax is 1%, deducted from the gross amount. Sending 100 MTR delivers 99 MTR to the recipient and 1 MTR to the immutable treasury. Direct transfers, allowance transfers, signed authorizations and DEX transfers all use this rule. Approvals and signatures do not move tokens and incur no token tax. Genesis and annual issuance remain untaxed so the 5% supply rule is preserved.

Gas is an additional cost in the network's native asset. The next pilot uses test ETH on the free shared Base Sepolia testnet; it is not yet deployed and is not MachineTransfer's own network. No US$250/month subscription will be started.

Tax is floor(grossBaseUnits / 100). Sub-100-base-unit transfers round the tax to zero. Allowances are spent at the gross amount. Self-transfers still pay tax; sending to treasury credits both legs there. Treasury-origin transfers recycle their tax to treasury, so its net balance debit is smaller than the gross authorization. The sender must still hold the entire gross amount. The full cost depends on the route: execution gas, rollup data and settlement fees, any relay charge, and, when used, exchange fees, slippage and bridge fees. Failed transactions can also consume gas. Infrastructure subscriptions are operator expenses, not a fixed per-payment quote.

An illustrative calculation, not a live quote

One hundredth of one US cent is US$0.0001. At an assumed MTR exchange rate, a gross payment of that dollar equivalent would pay US$0.000001 in treasury tax and deliver US$0.000099, plus gas paid separately. These are arithmetic examples, not a market quote: MTR has no established dollar value.

The updated local signed transfer used 110,888 gas in its recorded fixture. Public gas, data fees, exchange rates and relay charges remain unknown. The previous untaxed gas example no longer describes this contract. To deliver an exact net amount N in token base units, use gross N + floor((N - 1) / 99) for positive N, then verify net received and quote actual gas.

The optional PaymentBatcher groups up to 64 separately signed authorizations in one atomic transaction. Every payment still pays the 1% tax. It reduces repeated transaction overhead, not all execution cost. Gas sponsorship would let the sender pay no gas directly while an operator funds it; that service is not implemented. Off-chain channels are also unimplemented. The fee helper uses integer arithmetic and keeps omitted charges unknown. It does not return a complete estimate when settlement, relay or bridge fees have not been supplied. A real wallet must estimate the actual transaction and show a fresh fee quote before signing or broadcasting. The local API's direct-transfer estimate is not the gas cost of the signed-authorization method.

The local Uniswap V2 demo pool charges 0.3% of the actual pool input to liquidity providers, plus the MTR transfer tax, network gas and price impact. The updated local test verifies taxed inputs and net outputs in both directions. Some DEX routers do not support transfer-tax tokens; this is not universal compatibility. That pool fee applies to swaps, not ordinary MTR sends. Future production pools and routes may charge different amounts. MTR has no verified public price or liquidity today, so it cannot currently be quoted as dollars sent.

Why would agents choose this?

Useful integrations require predictable APIs, exact amounts, verifiable receipts, recipient acceptance, sufficient liquidity and low total cost. OpenAPI and discovery files make capabilities readable to software. The new optional local policy helper checks trusted recipients, exact chain and asset, per-payment and fee ceilings, expiry, and explicit swap/slippage limits. It does not implement cumulative budgets, session keys or on-chain enforcement.

Agents must follow their users' permissions and compare available methods. No code or token name can guarantee that independent AIs will prefer MTR over Stripe, stablecoins or another network. Adoption must be earned through working integrations and measured reliability.

What is next?

Reuse the current website hosting and the verified MCRTPay recipient. Keep blockchain workloads off the shared Merlin production host because of current resource pressure. The next useful public stage is a free shared Base Sepolia pilot with test ETH, followed by a test-asset merchant trial. A funded testnet signer is still needed. A dedicated MachineTransfer network remains a separate funded, reviewed milestone. The rejected US$250/month option is no longer the plan.

The full launch checklist separates completed local engineering from public deployments and unfinished dependencies. The 5% supply display has been removed from the homepage; this monetary disclosure and the contract rule remain.