Micropayment

A micropayment is a payment so small — cents or fractions of a cent — that traditional payment systems cannot process it economically, because fixed fees would exceed the amount itself. Card networks typically charge a base fee per transaction plus a percentage, which makes charging someone two cents for an article or a few seconds of streaming impractical over conventional rails.

Crypto has long promised to fix this, and the practical progress has come from systems that avoid putting every tiny payment on a base blockchain, where fees would also dominate. The Lightning Network on Bitcoin is the clearest example: two parties open a payment channel and can then exchange thousands of near-instant payments as small as a fraction of a cent, settling to the blockchain only when the channel closes. A concrete use case is streaming payments — for instance, paying a podcast creator a few satoshis per minute listened, which some podcast apps have implemented.

Proposed uses include pay-per-article journalism, machine-to-machine payments between devices or AI agents, in-game economies, and tipping. A common misconception is that the barrier to micropayments was ever purely technical; even with near-zero fees, businesses have found that users often dislike being charged per tiny unit and prefer subscriptions, so adoption depends on product design as much as on rails. Still, where per-use pricing genuinely fits — bandwidth, API calls, content tips — low-fee crypto rails make models possible that card networks priced out.