The first version of almost every machine-payments system is prefunding: put a balance with each service you intend to use, draw it down, top it up when it runs low. It works fine for one or two counterparties. It stops working the moment an agent is choosing services dynamically.
The capital problem
Prefunding forces you to answer a question you cannot answer in advance: how much will this agent spend, with this specific service, before the next top-up? Guess high and capital sits idle in balances you may never use. Guess low and the agent stalls mid-task waiting for a transfer to confirm.
With a hundred services in reach, the idle capital is not a rounding error — it is a hundred separate buffers, each sized for a worst case that only one of them will hit.
The latency problem
The other cost is time. A top-up is a chain transaction, and a chain transaction lands in seconds at best. An agent that discovers a new service mid-task has to stop, fund it, wait for confirmation, and only then make the call it wanted to make.
Credit removes the stop. The spending limit is checked against a line the payer already holds, so a first request to a service the agent has never used before costs exactly one round trip.
What credit changes
- One line, many counterparties. Capital backs the payer, not each individual relationship, so adding a service costs nothing up front.
- Instant authorization. Checking a limit is a lookup, not a transfer.
- Netted settlement. Guarantees accumulate into a clearing cycle and settle as net positions, so on-chain cost is amortized instead of paid per request.
- Auditable by construction. Every netted settlement expands back into the individual charges that produced it.
The trade you are making
Credit is not free of risk — it moves the risk from capital lockup to counterparty exposure, and that exposure has to be underwritten by someone. That is the part 4Mica takes on: limits, monitoring, and settlement guarantees sit in the credit layer, so services get paid and payers keep their capital working.
For how that plays out in an integration, see How 4Mica works.