Quack AI announced today that its signature-based execution layer, Q402, is now live on the Avalanche C-Chain, a move the startup says will make agent-driven applications feel native on one of the fastest L1 ecosystems. In a post on X, the team framed the deployment as a milestone for “verifiable, policy-aware execution” that leverages Avalanche’s sub-second finality and builder-first tooling to scale real-world agent usage.
Quack AI says the release brings three headline features to the Avalanche developer community: a “Zero Gas Barrier” that allows ERC-20 settlements without requiring users to hold AVAX for gas, a “Sign-to-Pay” flow that decouples user intent from transaction execution, and a production-ready, auditable execution fabric for what the company calls the emerging agent economy.
From Sign to Settlement
At its core, Q402 uses signature-based authorization: a single cryptographic signature represents a user’s intent and can be carried through to execution by relayers and facilitators. That model collapses the traditional three-step UX, sign, fund gas, submit, into a unified “sign-then-settle” experience that Quack AI argues is far better suited to automated agents and large-scale, real-world flows.
The Quack AI documentation expands on Q402 as an implementation of an open x402 standard that pairs delegated execution with governance intelligence and policy enforcement, signaling the project aims to be more than a UX band-aid and instead a foundational layer for autonomous on-chain systems.
For Avalanche builders, the most immediate benefit will likely be reduced onboarding friction. Removing the need for end users to hold native gas tokens simplifies payments, micro-transactions, and other UX-sensitive flows common in consumer apps, games, and tokenized financial services.
Sign-to-Pay additionally allows service providers to separate the approval step from the mechanics of settlement, opening possibilities for safer delegated workflows where institutions or multisig setups can sign intent and trusted infrastructure handles the rest. Quack AI’s announcement stresses both performance and auditability, two selling points for teams that must balance automation with compliance.
The company included a link to the contract deployment on Snowtrace in its announcement, inviting developers to inspect the live transaction and the deployed code. While the broader Q402 roadmap includes integrations and verification tooling, the live C-Chain deployment marks the first production footprint on Avalanche and could act as a springboard for additional collaborations and relayer networks.
Observers of the space have already noted Quack AI’s broader push into verifiable execution, and the recent coverage highlights partnerships and ecosystem work intended to pair execution guarantees with cryptographic proof systems to reduce trust assumptions in autonomous systems.
There are questions that naturally follow any new execution abstraction: how will relayer economics work at scale, who will bear settlement risk, and what auditing tools will be standard for verifying agent reasoning and behavior? Quack AI’s materials suggest those are active design goals.
The company positions Q402 not only as a UX improvement but as a governance-aware layer that can record and enforce policy in execution paths. Whether that vision plays out will depend on adoption by builders and the emergence of robust facilitator networks that can safely carry signed intents into on-chain outcomes.
For now, Avalanche users and developers have a new primitive to experiment with: an execution layer that aims to make verification the default and execution feel native. If Q402 delivers on its promises, it may accelerate the shift from manual, gas-oriented workflows to delegated, auditable agent economies and offer a template for how other chains could support signed intent and gas abstraction at scale.