Why We Built Furlpay Around Stablecoin Payments, AI Agents and Arbitrum

Furlpay is a stablecoin payments, travel and investing platform. You can book from 2.2M+ hotels and flights, pay in USDC, and hold a portfolio — in one app, secured by passkeys instead of seed phrases. Under the hood, every payment settles on Arbitrum, and every API we expose can be called and paid for by an AI agent as easily as by a person.

We did not arrive at this stack by accident. Over the past eighteen months, the largest names in payments have been converging on the same ingredients: Mastercard brought 24/7 stablecoin settlement to Arbitrum, Robinhood launched its own chain on Arbitrum Orbit, Coinbase created the x402 payment protocol for AI agents, and Visa is building agent-trust infrastructure with Cloudflare. These moves validate a broader trend: programmable payments and stablecoin infrastructure are going mainstream. Furlpay is built for that same direction — focused on combining payments, travel and investing into a single consumer product.

The problem: merchant payment fees on card rails

When a customer pays $150 by card, the merchant typically receives $144.75 to $147.75. The difference — interchange, network assessments and acquirer margin — usually lands between 1.5% and 3.5%, and it funds rewards programs, fraud losses and several layers of intermediaries.

A stablecoin transfer has none of those layers. The money moves directly from payer to merchant on-chain. On Arbitrum, the entire cost is Furlpay's 0.5% fee plus roughly half a cent of gas.

The Furlpay figure is live, not projected — you can query it right now at furlpay.com/api/payments/fees/estimate. Card figures are typical merchant discount ranges based on public information; actual pricing varies by issuer, category and geography. For a travel merchant on ten-percent margins, the gap is a meaningful share of the profit on every booking.

What we built: stablecoin payments with a 0.5% fee

Our payments API creates a quote, hands the payer's wallet an EIP-712 authorization to sign, screens both sides against sanctions lists, and settles in USDC on Arbitrum One. Receipts link straight to Arbiscan.

• Compliance before the chain — KYC tiers, sanctions screening on both legs of every payment, FATF Travel Rule payloads and MiCA-aware jurisdiction rules run server-side before any transaction is submitted.
• A hard ceiling in the contract — our router is designed to refuse any fee above 1% on-chain, whatever the API quotes, so the trust boundary is cryptographic rather than organizational.
• Batch payouts, refunds and a public fee estimator round out the merchant surface.

Agentic commerce: AI agents as paying customers

The fastest-growing payments customer of 2026 is not a person. The x402 protocol revives HTTP's 402 status code so an AI agent can pay per request in USDC — no account, no card on file. Coinbase and Cloudflare created it, and adoption has been rapid across Base and Solana.

Furlpay runs its own x402 facilitator on Arbitrum, Base and Solana. We designed it around the attack classes documented in recent x402 security research (see "Free-Riding the Agentic Web"): quotes are cryptographically bound to the resource they price, nonces are single-use, and malformed payment headers fail closed. Agents discover what Furlpay sells through our resource catalog and MCP servers, and can search, book and pay for travel autonomously.

We are not alone here, and that is the point. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard's Agent Pay bring agents to card rails; Coinbase operates a hosted facilitator across several chains. Agentic payments is the youngest layer of the stack — positions are far from settled, and we believe a focused, security-first implementation can be genuinely competitive.

Why Arbitrum

Arbitrum One offers deep stablecoin liquidity, sub-cent transaction fees with predictable gas pricing after the ArbOS Dia upgrade, and Ethereum-grade security. It is also where institutional settlement is consolidating — the same rail Mastercard chose for stablecoin settlement and Robinhood chose for its tokenized-stock chain.

Our smart contracts — a payment router, an x402 settlement facilitator, a travel booking escrow and ERC-721 booking receipts — are open source on GitHub with a passing test suite, heading to Arbitrum Sepolia next. Renting block space on Arbitrum rather than running our own chain keeps our costs near zero while we grow; the option to graduate to a dedicated Orbit chain later stays open.

Where Furlpay fits in the payments landscape

We are not trying to replace card networks, exchanges or brokerages — they serve billions of people well. Our observation is simpler: few platforms combine real-world commerce, agentic payments and compliance-first stablecoin rails in a single product, and we believe that whitespace is worth building into.

What we are honest about

Furlpay is early. The product is live at furlpay.com with real authentication and real APIs, but several integrations run in demo mode, our contracts are tested rather than deployed, and we have no payment volume yet. The incumbents have distribution, licenses and balance sheets we do not.

What we have is speed, focus and timing. The proof points ahead of us, in order: deploy the contracts to Arbitrum Sepolia and then Arbitrum One; complete a real end-to-end agentic booking — agent finds a hotel via MCP, pays via x402, escrow releases on-chain, receipt minted; and sign a first design partner who accepts USDC through the merchant rail.

Try it

• Explore travel with USDC checkout at furlpay.com/travel.
• Building something? Start at the developer portal and the docs.
• Query the live fee estimator: furlpay.com/api/payments/fees/estimate?amount=150.
• Read the contracts and SDKs on GitHub.
• Talk to us directly — furlpay.com/talk-to-us. We will be at the Arbitrum Open House in London, July 10-12.