Solana introduced Payment Channels on September 4, 2026, allowing an AI agent to authorize a spending limit once, make repeated low-value payments against it and settle the net result in a single on-chain transaction. Alibaba Cloud is the first partner, with an inference API endpoint available through Pay.sh at launch. In a test involving 100,000 wallets routed through a payment-channel proxy, the Solana Foundation recorded more than 1 million payments per second, while developer materials describe capacity of up to 1 million transactions per second. Solana documentation lists a settlement cycle of about 203 seconds across 100,000 channels and a cost of $0.0078 per 1 million payments. The system builds on the x402 HTTP payment standard and MPP session protocol and is designed for paid API calls, computing and machine-to-machine services. SOL was reported at $103.61, up 3.3% over 24 hours on September 4, while another snapshot showed $104.98, up 5.31%, with analysts discussing targets of $500 and $1,000 or more.