AI agents are getting powerful, but they still can’t reliably pay for things because the internet’s payment stack is built to stop bots. Big players like Visa, Stripe/OpenAI, Google, and Coinbase are racing to define “agentic payments,” but the standards they push are likely to be permissioned, incomplete, or create lock-in around a small set of approved rails.
If open-source agents want to stay competitive, they need to rally around open, widely-usable payment rails and push merchants to support agent-friendly checkout. Whatever you think of bitcoin, it was made for this.
Written and narrated by Spiral’s Matt Corallo, a long-time bitcoin open-source developer. Read the full article or listen on Apple/Spotify.
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