The Best Money For Agents

Spiral PM Mat Balez weighs the relative merits of stablecoins vs bitcoin for agentic payments and nudges us towards the more neutral option.

Written by Mat Balez

Everything is moving at AI speed now.

As recently as a few months ago, the question “how will my agent pay for things?” didn’t have a great answer. Humans had to intervene frequently to help agents log in to services and obtain API keys to bypass credit card payment gates, blunting much of the utility of persistent agents.

Today, there are dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of wallets and tools that let agents get money to buy things semi-autonomously on the emerging machine-payable web. These range from virtual credit cards (e.g. Visa’s CLI) to stablecoins (via Coinbase’s x402) to bitcoin’s Lightning Network (via L402) or any of the above using Tempo’s new Stripe-backed MPP protocol.

There are already tens of thousands of paid endpoints ready for use across these options, with the most popular services being the infrastructural pieces agents need today, such as generative AI backends, hosting, search, and data providers. These are the “picks and shovels” of nascent agentic commerce.

Screenshot of 402index.io on 5/11/26

Looking ahead, it’s an exciting time to imagine what else might come to exist. What will agents of the future need? What will retain and grow in value in a world of AI-driven abundance? Will agents find ways to earn money autonomously in this new digital economy? These are questions for builders, entrepreneurs, and agents to explore, and explore they will.

Agentic payments, alongside agentic everything, will continue to grow over time. It’s tempting to wonder which payment protocol is best suited for agentic payments, but the fact is that modern agents are smart enough to speak any well-documented protocol that gets the job done. The more fundamental question is: what type of digital money is best suited for the agentic economy?

Stablecoins and bitcoin are the emerging contenders.

It won’t surprise anyone that stablecoins are vying for usage in agentic commerce—their corporate advocates have been very public with their sales pitches. But the fact that bitcoin works (at least) as well for agentic payments today is still widely under-appreciated. So many people still haven’t yet realized that bitcoin is more than just an asset for savings; it can also be transacted in tiny quantities to transfer value instantly, anywhere. Exactly the kind of thing agents need to operate on their own.

But we’re still at the very beginning of how and why agents use money. So, which money will they use?

The virtues of USD stablecoins are obvious: they make digital US dollars accessible to anyone or anything that wants them, wherever they might be. This inherent borderlessness, along with their ability to avoid the volatility of a still-speculative asset like bitcoin and to be used without identity verification (at least for the time being), makes stablecoins well-suited to agents’ needs right now. Paying $0.001 USDC on Base via x402 for your favorite API call is trivially easy. And that’s cool.

But there’s a fundamental downside that has long plagued stablecoins, one that bears scrutiny as much for agentic use as it does human use: stablecoins are products of centralized power and authority. This has implications.

Stablecoins require permission to use. That permission comes, tacitly, from the stablecoin issuer, who can choose to freeze the smart contract underlying any stablecoin token at any time. This gate-keeping power is regularly exercised by all stablecoin operators, often in connection with hacks or law enforcement actions that seem well-intentioned on the surface. But it should trouble freedom-minded people (if not their agents) to think through the implications of such financial censorship being possible without meaningful oversight or accountability—particularly at the giant scale of the entire digital economy. Can a free society exist if every action requires the implied consent of a few stablecoin company’s executives?

Every stablecoin out there (and there are many) runs on several crypto networks (of which there are many as well). This creates a combinatorial explosion of possibilities, each technically incompatible. This means that before you or your agent transact a stablecoin today, it’s not as simple as knowing your counterparty wants to use a stablecoin—you need to agree on a specific coin on a specific network. And if you don’t have that particular stablecoin flavor, you’ll need to swap to the right one. It’s a UX pain for humans, it’s a source of friction, and an added cost, for agents. Surely, bridges will emerge to make this swapping-in and -out ever easier, but such bridges will inevitably become additional points of centralization and frailty for the ecosystem.

Stablecoins fail to provide any financial privacy whatsoever. Stablecoin transactions are public at their blockchain wallet addresses, revealing patterns of spending and behavior. This is much worse than the privacy of the legacy payment system, where only financial institutions privy to a transaction see its information. With stablecoins, it’s like your credit card statement is publicly visible.

For example, here you can see my OpenClaw agent equipped with an AgentCash USDC wallet on Base being funded ($5.11), using StableTravel via x402 to search for a flight to SFO ($0.02) and then using Exa, again via x402, to search for clay tennis courts in Vancouver ($0.007).

Screenshot from Etherscan

While glancing at the blockchain explorer may not make all of this immediately obvious, it is privacy-invasive for several reasons. First, your wallet address is revealed to every merchant you pay, any of whom could easily look up your complete transaction history. Second, every destination address is publicly revealed, and with a bit of detective work, those addresses can be tied to specific merchants, since these mappings can be leaked and indexed. For example, I pointed ChatGPT to my OpenClaw agent’s public transaction history on Etherscan, and it was able to figure out that the first payment went to a StableTravel wallet and inferred with high probability that the second payment was an Exa search. Not rocket science. Third, all of this payment data is not just public but public forever, just awaiting future large-scale data analysis and profiling. If this sounds alarming, it’s because it is.

But stablecoin operators are starting to react to this privacy red flag. Notably, Tempo—the blockchain that settles stablecoin transactions in MPP—has recently introduced a design for privacy Zones in which trusted Zone operators can be chosen to whom transaction visibility can be strictly scoped. While this is better than nothing, it falls short of the complete financial privacy we might expect to underpin financial inclusion and individual freedom at an agentic scale, especially in light of the risk that centralized issuers or networks may one day require KYC permissions if/when regulatory pressure makes that a requirement. It’s clear, in other words, that stablecoins are primarily instruments of compliance, and will remain that way.

It should be acknowledged that compliance is not inherently bad—indeed, for almost every regulated company in the world, compliance is a legal necessity and generally intended to protect us against bad actors. So what’s the concern here? It has some nuance.

One concern is what we choose to optimize for. There is an order of operations, and I tend to believe we should first and foremost create things (in this case, a form of money) that serve the needs of its users (in this case, human or agentic) and then determine the least invasive way to achieve compliance. This is a needle that can be threaded with care. For instance, there are many public-regulated financial institutions that today offer a wide array of bitcoin products (and crypto more generally) while complying with all regulatory requirements across their jurisdictions. So we have proof points that technologies that grant greater individual freedoms and compliance need not be mutually exclusive.

An even bigger concern is stablecoins’ centralized nature—whether at the level of the issuer, network, bridge, or zone operator—creating the risk of regulatory capture or abuse. Even the most ardent supporters of democratic government should be reminded that our systems of authority and control need to continue to work even when people we dislike or distrust attain power. As such, we should all worry about a growing global digital economy coming under the increasing regulatory control of one nation’s government, complete with its potential excesses, which often take the form of regulatory overreach.

Yet most of these concerns vis-a-vis regulation, and stablecoins more generally, will remain sufficiently so far “below the surface” that the vast majority of people and their agents simply won’t care. The $0.001 USDC API call remains, alluringly, trivially easy.

What’s more, the marketing around stablecoins serving both agentic and human commerce will only increase from here. Stablecoin issuers and their partners will invest heavily in PR and promote agentic protocols that favor their assets. Consumer awareness will continue to rise, thriving developer ecosystems will emerge, and distribution will be driven through the existing products and platforms fintech giants already control, leveraging these advantages on both sides of the marketplace. They’ll partner up with even bigger industry players and push, push, push.

All this to say, we can expect stablecoin adoption to grow.

Yet, it remains crucial that alternatives to centralized control exist. Even pragmatists should concede that building an agentic economy that works only with the permission of the few leaves us all in a vulnerable place.

Fortunately, an alternative already exists in bitcoin’s Lightning Network.

The Lightning Network can instantly settle borderless payments of any size at high throughput, low cost, and without user identity, all denominated in bitcoin. But unlike stablecoin’s crypto networks, the Lightning Network routes payments through private, onion-encrypted paths that obscure transaction details. Payment privacy is baked into the protocol by design.

The best part is that, because it’s bitcoin, there is no issuer creating and assigning tokens, so there are no smart contracts that can be frozen. Bitcoin held in self-custody can always be moved or spent by whoever holds the private keys. It almost seems like magic that real money can land instantly in your wallet (unlike credit cards, where funds take days to settle), and you can be 100% sure the money is yours (unlike stablecoin tokens that amount to IOUs).

Not only does Lightning avoid the need for issuers, but as a neutral, open protocol, the Lightning Network doesn’t have a concentrated group of decision-makers running the project. Like bitcoin itself, it is fully open-source software, maintained by developers worldwide and operated by a decentralized network of nodes. The growing adoption of Lightning does nothing to centralize authority, as there is no authority to centralize. This ability to preserve credible neutrality over time gives Lightning a chance to emerge as the payment rail everyone converges on in the long run as an alternative to any other proprietary winner-take-all outcome.

Lightning is a hardened technology that works today. With almost a decade under its belt operating machine-to-machine payments at a global scale, the Lightning Network has already demonstrated that its decentralized design can hold over the long term. It’s traditionally been a little hard to build on top of Lightning and deploy payments solutions. No longer. Finally, developer UX has caught up. There are now many tools and wallets (such as MoneyDevKit, Lightspark, Alby, and Lexe) that make it easy for developers and merchants to get started with enabling agentic payments via Lightning, with almost all the complexity of running nodes and managing liquidity abstracted away. For instance, it’s as easy as “npx @moneydevkit/agent-wallet@latest init” to give your agent a self-custodial Lightning Wallet where it can start accepting and sending payments immediately.

For pragmatists out there motivated by cold hard costs, it’s worth noting too that Lightning can be materially cheaper to route agentic payments under the right conditions. For example, if you transact at high frequency with the same counterparties, your marginal transaction cost on Lightning goes to almost zero whereas with a stablecoin you hit some minimum per-transaction floor. For instance, on the Base network, the current minimum gas price appears to be about $0.0005, making microtransactions in tiny amounts using USDC cost-prohibitive.

Even with a centralized blockchain like Tempo, where the operator may fully subsidize stablecoin transaction costs in the short term, you have to wonder what would happen in a hypothetical future in which they win and achieve monopoly control over payments: Stripe ends up with tremendous pricing power, effectively determining what the world pays for payments.

The permissionless and open nature of the Lightning Network on the other hand, ensures that competitive pressure among routing nodes and liquidity providers precludes a future of monopoly control with monopoly pricing power by anyone.

This makes Lightning not only credibly more neutral over the long term, but also credibly cheaper.

A fair treatment of Lightning must note its main downside: accepting and holding bitcoin for agentic payments, or any payments for that matter, exposes you to short-term price volatility. If you’re an economic actor with near-term obligations denominated in USD, you may find that the downside risk of price volatility is unpalatable. One solution is to seek payment in bitcoin and convert sufficient amounts of your treasury to USD to cover short-term obligations. Another is to use emerging bitcoin-native stable-value mechanisms, such as stable channels. Or you and your agent could simply zoom out, and make a calculated bet that the ups and downs will, over the long term, net out positively—knowing that more activity, in the fullness of time, will eventually dampen volatility.

Alternatively, you could have your agent use the low-cost, decentralized, neutral, and interoperable routing properties of the Lightning Network to send & receive US dollars directly, without ever worrying about volatility. This works today. For example, a Cash App customer can pay a Square merchant from their USD balance, have funds flow as bitcoin over the Lightning Network, and land as USD in the merchant’s account. The practical benefit of this type of “invisible” use of the Lightning Network for merchants is avoiding costly credit card processing fees, while still working with the currency they know—kind of like getting the fast & low cost benefits of a stablecoin, without the associated concerns.

At the end of the day, whether agents will adopt stablecoins or bitcoin as money depends largely on the humans behind the agents and their assessment of tail risks, desire for financial privacy, and appetite for living under the threat of centralized control.

But even more than human judgment about monetary preferences and risks, convenience will be what drives agentic payment volume. And convenience is largely derived from default settings. What, then, will be the default settings of the digital economy?

Without action and advocacy, many of these default settings risk becoming stablecoins. That is the path we’re on. But with some work and energy, the bitcoin community can put bitcoin on the menu.

Here’s how:

1. Make it the default for Open Source AI.

“Open source AI should have open source money” has always had a nice ring to it. Now it’s time to make that true.

It should absolutely be the case that open-source agents (like OpenClaw, Hermes, Goose, and all the other persistent-agent OSS products that will continue to come to market) ship with a bitcoin Lightning wallet out of the box. Neutral and open payment rails should be the lingua franca for agents aiming for neutral positioning and operations.

We need to start influencing, educating, inspiring, and building bridges to help overcome biases among relevant OSS AI project leaders. Let’s convince them (better, show them) that having open access to money can make their products better, different, and more enduring than what will come out of the big AI labs.

2. Nudge Big AI towards bitcoin.

Perhaps the highest-impact default setting that could drive agentic payment volume is the consumer experience for payments within the persistent agents ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini will ship. Our null hypothesis is that they’ll optimize for stablecoins and/or incremental improvements to trad-fi rails, shoe-horned through partnerships with incumbents.

However, the big AI labs have an interesting PR opportunity with bitcoin: they could adopt bitcoin for payments and use its neutrality to signal their desire to avoid the centralization of unnecessary power, countervailing their own growing influence over almost all other aspects of human society: thought, creativity, and labor. There’s no reason for AI to control our payments, and the leaders of the big AI labs could earn public goodwill for making this true, even making it the standard. Pushing the Overton window open this far is a long shot, but it’s a long shot worth exploring.

3. Find new demand.

It is said that demand cures all. We should, therefore, try to cure all.

Let’s build cool new product experiences, new endpoints, and new services that all put bitcoin to use in amazing and surprising new ways for agents and humans. One viral hit among consumer audiences that had bitcoin agentic spending (or earning!) at the core of the experience, easily and naturally, could shift everyone’s mindset quickly towards the virtues and necessity of bitcoin in agentic commerce.

Bitcoin can become the default money for a whole class of 🔥new agentic experiences—it’s one of the things we’re exploring in the Flint community. Making the world you want to see has always been the best way to make it happen.

4. Max out the endpoints.

Let’s make sure that every useful endpoint that is machine-payable has a bitcoin-payable option—either via L402, MPP or making Lightning work inside x402. This should be true for everything out there right now and for everything emerging. We should not let stablecoins win the coverage battle.

This is a widespread awareness and business development issue: we need to let all developers know that bitcoin works just as well for agentic payments, and point them to the easy tools that make it possible.

5. Pragmatic tooling.

As stablecoins will likely claim a significant share of the market for small machine-to-machine payments, bitcoin payments tooling would further its own ends if it pragmatically supported stables alongside the Lightning Network. The doctrine should be to make it easy for customers to pay and merchants to be paid, regardless of rail or ideology.

To the extent that bitcoin-only solutions add time & effort for anyone to use them, they undermine their own adoption. For instance, agentic wallet products could ship with both bitcoin and stablecoin support (perhaps starting with USDC?), making it easy to maintain a “blended treasury” that continuously optimizes balances between spending and savings use cases, subject to forecasts of near-term obligations. We won’t design the full product here, but we do need to be mindful that, in any future scenario, stablecoins will be part of the picture.

We can choose to make bitcoin an easy partner that wins or be confined to an ideological niche.

6. The default for saving.

We should lean into bitcoin’s core value proposition: a long-term store of value that combats the ills of inflation. If we can convince humans and their agents that any responsible treasury with some long-term outlook needs a non-zero % of bitcoin, then it becomes natural for them to demand bitcoin transactions.

Bitcoin plans in centuries. Near-term adoption notwithstanding, the most important thing to achieve in the agentic economy, as it starts to come together, is to help merchants, users, and agentic operators everywhere realize that bitcoin’s Lightning Network is a viable option, one every bit as feasible as stablecoins.

Even if many (most?) don’t choose bitcoin and even if many (most?) choose stablecoins, it’s all good as long as bitcoin remains a viable option that works, with high-performance tooling across the stack, embedded as default settings wherever we can.

Eventually, in the long arc of time, if bitcoin has persisted and remained a viable exit path for agentic payments long enough, agents will choose to exit. Or will need to.