Tools
A toolbox of the deployable Bitcoin tools an agent runs on — pick the one you need.
Each card is a tool an autonomous agent actually deploys — what it is, when to reach for it, how to start, what it needs first, and the gotchas worth knowing before you ship. The protocols and standards underneath them (L402, Nostr Wallet Connect, BOLT12, LNURL) are explained in The Stack, not catalogued here. The bridges to legacy money live at Exchange; 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.
How to find the right tool
The cards are grouped by what they do — wallets, node toolkits, ecash software, bridges. But before you pick one, it helps to know how much you want to run yourself: that ranges from leaning on a hosted service (live in minutes) to running your own full node (trust nothing). The Quickstart lays out those four pathways and points you at the right tools for each — start there if you're not sure where to begin.
Within the toolbox, every card also carries a prerequisite tag — what you must already have in place to run it:
- 1 Keys only — a keypair — no funds, no account
- 2 An account — a login at a hosted service
- 3 A wallet — a funded Lightning wallet you control
- 4 An L2 connection — a Cashu / Fedimint mint or a shared-UTXO layer (Spark)
- 5 Your own Lightning node — a node with a funded channel
- 6 Your own Bitcoin node — the base layer beneath a fully sovereign setup — needs only a machine
Match the rung you're at and skip past the tools you can't run yet. For how the whole stack fits together, read The Stack; to get an agent paying from a standing start, follow the Quickstart.
Wallets & treasuries
Where an agent holds and spends its funds — headless non-custodial wallets, key-free wallet connectors, and agent-native treasuries.
Alby & Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC)
A standard for controlling a Lightning wallet remotely — scoped, budgeted, and revocable — without ever handing over the keys.
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.
Agentic AQUA
Jan3's open-source MCP wallet — an AI assistant generates addresses, checks balances, and sends Bitcoin, Liquid, or Lightning (via Boltz swaps) from one seed, by natural language.
Money Dev Kit
A self-custodial Lightning payments SDK — add Bitcoin checkout to an app in minutes, and equip an agent with its own keys-and-accounts-free wallet via the agent-wallet CLI.
Lightning Enable
An L402 layer for agentic commerce — a Lightning-wallet MCP that lets an agent pay (and earn) per API call, plus a drop-in that gates any API behind per-call sats.
Node toolkits — run your own
The infrastructure you run yourself: the base Bitcoin node, node-backed Lightning toolkits, and programmable wallet servers.
bitcoin-core
The reference Bitcoin full node — the L1 root every self-custodial Lightning setup sits on. Validate the chain yourself, hold your own keys, and expose RPC for the tools above it.
CLINK (+ Lightning.Pub)
ShockNet's open standards for Lightning payments over Nostr — static offers, direct debits, and delegated spending permissions, addressed to NIP-05 identities, no web server required.
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.
Reflex
Amboss's automation layer for a node you already run — pathfinding, routing/liquidity workflows, invoices, and triggers, all driven through one GraphQL API.
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.
ThunderHub
An open-source LND node manager in the browser — channel, liquidity, and fee management for your own node, and now the host for Amboss's Rails X (self-custody stablecoin trades) and Magma (one-click liquidity).
Ecash software
Bearer-token systems above Lightning — instant, private, and lightweight at the agent layer, with a custodial (mint or federation) trust trade-off.
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.
Evaluating an ecash mint
How to judge whether a Cashu or Fedimint mint is trustworthy — the hard solvency signals, the reputation layer, and the one rule that beats all of them.
Spark
A shared-UTXO, Lightning-compatible Bitcoin L2 for instant, near-zero-cost transfers of BTC and Bitcoin-native assets — no bridges, no wrapping.
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.
Bridges & swaps
The edge where the substrate meets other rails and assets — submarine swaps, on/off-ramps, and issued-asset overlays.
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.
Agent services
The other side of the toolbox: live services an agent buys from — inference, compute, data, VPN, gift cards — settling in Bitcoin over Lightning. They have their own catalogue.