What is Fast? Understanding the Parallel Payment Infrastructure for AI Agents

Fast is designed as a specialized coordination and payment infrastructure, aiming to become the leading payment standard for the AI agent economy. The system centrally processes programmable transactions between AI agents, merchants, and services, ensuring completion times under 1 second and comprehensive compatibility with both fiat and stablecoins.

Unlike traditional blockchain models that focus on human transactions, Fast opens a new frontier by building an optimized payment infrastructure for automated AI agents, which require micro-payment methods that are instantaneous and completely eliminate manual approval. Let’s explore this project with Coin68 in the article below.

What is Fast? Understanding the Parallel Payment Infrastructure for AI Agents

What is Fast?

Fast operates as a comprehensive payment infrastructure, facilitating automatic connections between services, merchants, and AI agents. The project optimizes collaboration, result verification, and flexible payment mechanisms for both fiat and crypto assets.

What is Fast?

The standout feature of Fast comes from the project’s bypassing of consensus mechanisms and the sequential processing of traditional blockchains, utilizing the FastSet architecture to operate millions of transactions in parallel without being bound by blocks or requiring direct interaction between validators. Thanks to this breakthrough in design, Fast achieves impressive processing speeds with an average completion time of just a few milliseconds and the ability to scale throughput beyond 1 million TPS, thereby thoroughly solving the instant transaction problem for the AI agent ecosystem.

Highlights

Automatic Payment Mechanism for AI Agents

Fast equips each agent with a dedicated wallet, enabling automatic execution of money transfer and receipt transactions without human intervention. Agents can pay ultra-small fees (micro-payments), which pose a significant challenge for traditional payment infrastructures. As a result, this solution lays the groundwork for a pay-per-request fee model applied in agent markets and API services.

Instant Transaction Speed

All transactions on Fast occur instantly, completely bypassing waiting times and requiring no confirmation from other validators. Evidence of this is that the network has successfully processed over 160,000 transactions for Rhuna, a payment platform for the entertainment industry, including both deposit and payment operations, achieving an average speed of 3.01 ms per transaction without any incidents.

Fast successfully processed over 160,000 transactions for Rhuna

Mathematical Verification

Fast applies a mathematical verification mechanism for all transactions, committing to the ability to prove the accuracy of all payment results. In the context of an infrastructure operating billions of USD daily among countless automated agents, reliability and correctness become essential factors rather than mere supplementary features.

Products and Features

Fast App

Fast App is the main payment wallet of the platform, where users manage balances, receive money, and track transaction history. The interface is simple, focusing on quick payment operations and digital asset management.

Fast Shop

Fast Shop integrates the shopping AI agent named Pif, allowing users to chat to find stores, compare products, and prepare orders. The shopping experience is entirely navigated through natural language instead of manual operations on the interface.

Fast ID

Fast ID serves as a digital identity management tool, storing personal information, addresses, and documents. Users can sign documents and manage records in one place, laying the foundation for transactions requiring identity verification.

Fast AllSet

Fast takes on the task of connecting the Fast network with fiat and blockchain systems. This solution allows users to deposit, withdraw, and convert USDC between Fast and supported EVM networks or make instant payments without the need for a bridge. All processing occurs completely automatically in the background, simplifying operations and eliminating technical barriers for both developers and end users.

Fast Skill and SDK

Fast Skill serves as a comprehensive SDK toolkit specifically for developers, supporting AI agents in initiating services and managing operational activities efficiently. Payments through Fast Skill are executed simply via a function call to receive instant receipts.

At the same time, the project introduces the HTTP x402 payment standard, allowing APIs to charge users directly upon access without the need for independent billing management infrastructure.

Mechanism of Operation

Fast operates on the FastSet protocol platform, a distributed payment network optimized for high-frequency transactions. By eliminating the consensus mechanism and sequential processing of traditional blockchains, FastSet allows independent validators to process payment requests in parallel without needing to communicate with each other, create blocks, or wait for confirmations.

The system architecture is divided into three specialized layers:

• Infrastructure Layer (Fast Network): The core payment network with superior parallel processing capabilities, providing sub-second settlement speeds, near-zero costs, and mathematically verified accuracy.
• Intermediate Layer (AllSet): The bridge for interaction between Fast and external systems such as fiat currencies or EVM networks.
• Application Layer (Fast Skill & SDK): A direct programming interface allowing developers to integrate and interact.

The automated payment process of the AI agent occurs entirely in a closed loop through the following steps:

1. The agent calls the payment function via the SDK.
2. Fast Network receives the request.
3. The network processes in parallel, completing settlement in just a few milliseconds.
4. The balance is updated instantly.
5. The transaction receipt is sent back to the agent.

All operations are 100% automated, requiring no human intervention or manual approval.

Development Team

Grigore Rosu, founder & CEO of Pi² Labs

Fast is a product developed by Pi² Labs (formerly Pi Square Labs), led by a core team with deep expertise in computer science and formal verification. The leadership team includes:

• Grigore Rosu (Co-Founder & CEO): Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He previously worked at NASA, holds a PhD from UC San Diego, and is a senior member of both IEEE and AAAS. He is also the author of the K Framework, a formal verification tool widely used in the blockchain field.
• Patrick MacKay (Co-Founder & COO): Former COO at Runtime Verification and previously served as the founding director of Capital One’s Digital Lab in Illinois. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and received his MBA from UIUC.

Investors

Fast's fundraising information has not been officially disclosed by the project. Coin68 will provide updates when the latest announcements from the project are available.

Tokenomics

Currently, Fast has no plans to issue any tokens in the future. Coin68 will provide updates when the latest announcements from the project are available.

Conclusion

This is all the information about the Fast project. Coin68 hopes that readers will grasp the basic information to better understand the project and how it operates. We wish you more useful knowledge!

Note: The information in this article is intended to provide knowledge and summarize publicly available information about the project, not investment advice. Coin68 is not responsible for any financial decisions you make.