Tools
The Bitcoin-substrate agent stack, as building blocks you can pick up.
Each card is one piece of the stack an autonomous agent actually runs on — what it is, when to reach for it, how to start, and the gotchas worth knowing before you ship. Grouped by layer, mirroring The Stack. The bridges to legacy money live at The Border Zone; the live adoption record is at Field Notes.
Building agent payments? Each card has a clean .md route and SoftwareApplication JSON-LD, and they are listed in agents.txt. The site helping you implement the substrate is the thesis.
Agent-integration primitives
The protocol affordances an agent pays and authenticates with — HTTP-payment gating and key-free remote wallet control.
L402
The HTTP-native payment protocol — pay a Lightning invoice to unlock an API, with a reusable credential proving you paid.
Alby & Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC)
A standard for controlling a Lightning wallet remotely — scoped, budgeted, and revocable — without ever handing over the keys.
BOLT12 (Offers)
Reusable Lightning payment requests — publish one "offer" and accept repeated payments against it, with receiver privacy via blinded paths.
LNURL
A family of small Lightning protocols (pay, withdraw, auth) and the Lightning Address — the pre-BOLT12 way to make payment endpoints discoverable over HTTPS.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
The open standard for giving agents structured access to tools and data — the rail a Lightning payment server plugs into so an agent can pay from inside its workflow.
L3 — ecash & scaling layers
Privacy-preserving bearer tokens and shared-UTXO scaling layers above Lightning — lightweight at the agent layer, no channel management.
Cashu
Chaumian bearer ecash on Bitcoin — instant, private, lightweight tokens an agent can hold and spend without channels or accounts.
Fedimint
Federated Bitcoin custody plus Chaumian ecash — a guardian federation holds the coins under threshold security while issuing private, Lightning-interoperable tokens.
Spark
A shared-UTXO, Lightning-compatible Bitcoin L2 for instant, near-zero-cost transfers of BTC and Bitcoin-native assets — no bridges, no wrapping.
Wallets & toolkits
Deployed architectures an agent actually runs — node toolkits, programmable wallet platforms, agent-native wallets and frameworks.
lightning-agent-tools
Lightning Labs' production AI-agent toolkit — composable skills plus an MCP server that let an agent run a node, pay L402 APIs, host paid endpoints, and keep its keys isolated.
LNbits
The most widely deployed programmable Lightning platform — isolated wallets, a clean REST API, and an extension ecosystem on top of any node backend.
Minibits Ippon
A Cashu wallet built from the ground up for AI agents — create and fund a short-lived, single-purpose wallet in one HTTP call or CLI command.
Xverse Agent Wallet
A self-custodial Bitcoin wallet built for AI agents — it answers an HTTP 402 by paying the Lightning invoice itself, no human checkout.
BitAgent
An early, open-source framework for agent-to-agent commerce — agents discover each other over Nostr, verify identity with DIDs, and settle work in sats over Lightning.
Agent services & marketplaces
Live deployments where an agent buys a service on the Bitcoin stack — the thesis, running in production.
Bridges & conversion
The edge where the substrate meets other rails and assets — swaps, on/off-ramps, asset overlays. These live at the boundary; see The Border Zone for the rails-vs-substrate distinction.
Strike
A Bitcoin/Lightning payments app and API with fiat on/off-ramp — the regulated-custodian bridge between agent payments and bank rails.
Boltz
Non-custodial atomic swaps between on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning, and Liquid — the submarine-swap bridge, exposed as an API.
Loop
Lightning Labs' non-custodial liquidity bridge — Loop Out and Loop In move balance between Lightning and on-chain via submarine swaps.
Taproot Assets
Lightning Labs' protocol for issuing assets — including stablecoins — on Bitcoin and moving them over Lightning rails. Lightning rails for assets, not Bitcoin substrate.