Spiral: A Bitcoin Newsletter, Now in Audio

About Spiral: A Bitcoin Newsletter, Now in Audio

Spiral builds and funds public goods that make money and intelligence more open, secure, and accessible. The team was founded in 2019 as a non-profit R&D lab within Block. Subscribe on Substack for updates or listen here. spiralxyz.substack.com (https://spiralxyz.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Spiral

Category

education · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Jul 2025

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   The Agentic State Machine

   goose launched (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/dd126afa6c73fe01ad4991a6b45a6d027cb02b29/README.md) a long time ago. Dog years have nothing on agent years. goose predates general agentic AI by a bit. The initial thought behind it all was: what happens if you give an LLM control over a shell session? Turns out interesting things happen. The model writes a command, the command runs, the result goes back into the conversation, and the model decides what to do next. Our tool calling grew naturally out of that experiment, as did the agent loop that now sits at the heart of most coding agents. Then tool calling got formalized. Then MCP happened (https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol). So did approvals (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/managing-tools/tool-permissions), context management (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/sessions/smart-context-management), to-do lists (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/mcp/todo-mcp), top-of-mind, subagents (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/subagents), retries, hooks (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/hooks), skills (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-skills), recipes (https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/recipes), and steering. But the original agent loop remained. Each feature added another branch, another local variable, or another special case. A dozen different concerns might be active inside one turn, each influencing the others. Cancellation needs to know whether inference or a tool is running. Compaction needs to understand provider errors and usage. Tools can change the prompt. A stop hook can turn a completed answer back into more work. The loop started to turn into spaghetti. A plugin system (https://pr-12130.goose-pr-previews-poc.pages.dev/docs/guides/context-engineering/plugins) seems like the natural answer. It helps up to a point: adding a tool or listening to an event fits nicely. But once a plugin needs to influence the whole turn, the central loop still has to decide when it runs, what it contributes to the prompt, whether it may continue the turn, and how its state survives a restart. The plugin API gradually acquires a hook for every part of the agent loop, while the loop remains responsible for coordinating them all. goose is taking a different approach. We have replaced the classic agent loop (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/pull/9574) with a re-entrant state machine. The persisted conversation is the main state, and each piece of agent behavior is encoded as an Operation (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/main/crates/goose-agent/src/operation.rs). The machine checks Operations in order. Each one either passes or returns a set of effects, and the first one that applies wins that step. It persists its effects and the machine starts again from the top with the new state. Consider a normal tool call. Inference sees that the last message came from the user and produces an assistant message requesting a tool. On the next step, the approval Operation gets the first chance to inspect it. If approval is needed, it adds a request to the conversation and yields to the client. Nothing stays running while the user decides. The client later stores the answer, and a newly constructed machine continues from there. If no approval is needed, the Operation passes. The tool execution Operation then recognizes the tool and runs it, adding the result to the conversation. Inference sees the tool response and asks the model what to do next. When the model finally answers without requesting another tool, the stop-hook Operation decides whether the turn may end. That re-entrancy matters beyond code organization. A server does not need to keep a co-routine and all its local variables alive while waiting for input. A process can restart and continue from the last persisted step. Another frontend can load the same session and carry on. The convenience runner still repeats steps until the machine yields, but it is only a small driver around a state machine that can be invoked once at a time. Operations are independent but cooperative. A tool handler claims only tools it knows how to execute. If it does not recognize one, it passes and gives another Operation a chance. The final unknown-tool Operation turns anything left over into an error for the model. The same ownership applies beyond execution. The skills Operation owns the command for listing skills, the tool for loading one, and the prompt text that tells the model which skills exist. Remove that Operation and all three disappear together. Inference is special, but it is still an Operation. Before calling the model, it collects tools, prompt sections, and top-of-mind from every Operation in the pipeline. The max-turns Operation can tell the model that its budget is running low. The recipe Operation can add a final-output tool. The skills Operation can advertise available skills. Inference does not need to know where any of these contributions came from. The other useful distinction is between effects (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/main/crates/goose/src/agents/state_machine/effects.rs) and events (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/main/crates/goose-agent/src/events.rs). Events are the live stream: a piece of text, a tool notification, or a usage update that the client should see immediately. Effects are the durable result: append this message, replace this conversation, update this tool request, or record this usage. A caller can ask the machine for one step and decide how to apply those effects, or use a convenience runner that keeps applying steps until the machine yields to the client. Testing gets much easier. We test complete collections of Operations against a small HTTP server that behaves like a model provider (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/main/crates/goose/src/agents/state_machine/tests/dummy_api.rs) and a real stateful calculator extension (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/main/crates/goose/src/agents/state_machine/tests/calculator_extension.rs). We also have a test runner that throws away the entire state machine after every applied step (https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/blob/main/crates/goose/src/agents/state_machine/tests/pipeline.rs) and constructs a new one from the persisted session. If a tool call still proceeds from request to response to final answer, we know the progress was really captured in state rather than hiding in a local variable. Not all state has disappeared. Providers, extension managers, and hooks remain runtime dependencies. Pending steering still begins in an in-memory queue, and external side effects need care: if a tool succeeds and the process crashes before it persists its response, rebuilding a state machine does not magically make that tool safe to run twice. The useful change is that these boundaries are now visible instead of being mixed into one long-running coroutine. The result is a codebase that is easier to test, refactor, and experiment with. A new idea for changing an agent can be expressed as an Operation and added to a pipeline without changing the state-machine core. The original agent loop got goose surprisingly far. Now we can change how an agent behaves without adding another branch. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralxyz.substack.com (https://spiralxyz.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   7 Jul 2026

   Spiral x Goose: The Best is Yet to Honk

   Spiral is expanding beyond bitcoin into open-source AI by bringing the core goose developers from Block onto the team. Our first area of focus will be evolving goose into the goose Development Kit (GDK), an SDK that lets developers build their own agentic AI applications rather than relying on a single client.Learn more at spiral.xyz This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralxyz.substack.com (https://spiralxyz.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   13 May 2026

   The Best Money For Agents

   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 (https://visacli.sh/)) to stablecoins (via Coinbase’s x402 (https://www.x402.org/)) to bitcoin’s Lightning Network (via L402 (https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l402)) or any of the above using Tempo’s new Stripe-backed MPP (https://mpp.dev/) protocol. There are already tens of thousands (https://402index.io/) 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. 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 (https://basescan.org/address/0x8aC5A39EB192cC2accf6D989C990b93fBC633702#tokentxns) my OpenClaw agent equipped with an AgentCash (https://agentcash.dev/) 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). 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 (https://tempo.xyz/blog/privacy-on-tempo) 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 (https://moneydevkit.com/), Lightspark (https://www.lightspark.com/), Alby (https://getalby.com/), and Lexe (https://www.lexe.app/)) 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 (https://stablechannels.com/). 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 (https://openclaw.ai/), Hermes (https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/), Goose (https://goose-docs.ai/), 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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (https://flints.dev) 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   12 May 2026

   Meet Loupe: AI-Powered Vulnerability Scanning for Open-Source Bitcoin

   Loupe is a new open-source security scanning tool from Spiral and Block designed to help bitcoin developers find vulnerabilities in open-source code. The episode explores how Loupe works, why AI-powered security tooling matters for the future of bitcoin, and the challenges of balancing high-signal vulnerability detection with the growing flood of AI-generated noise in open source. Read the full article on Substack: spiralbtc.substack.com (http://spiralbtc.substack.com) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   15 Apr 2026

   Metacognition is the AI Skill of the future. Always has been.

   This Spiral report explores how open-source builders are using AI today, based on survey data and interviews with Spiral grantees and team members. Written by Austin Krauss, it argues that the most important skill is not mastering any one tool, but developing metacognition: the ability to reflect on, adapt, and redesign your workflow as AI evolves. The report identifies four emerging builder archetypes: the Verifier, the Orchestrator, the Upskiller, and the Hyper Coder. Other key findings include: 84% of respondents use AI every day, 64% spend more than $100 per month on AI tools, and brainstorming now matches code writing as the top use case, suggesting builders value AI as a thinking partner just as much as a code generator. Explore the full written report at spiralbtc.substack.com (http://spiralbtc.substack.com). Follow: x.com/_austin_f linkedin.com/in/afkrauss This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   25 Feb 2026

   Open-Source AI Needs to Get Serious

   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. https://x.com/spiralbtc https://x.com/TheBlueMatt This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   16 Dec 2025

   Bitcoin Merchant Community: One Month Update

   The Bitcoin Merchant Community (https://www.bitcoinmerchantcommunity.org/) is an effort to accelerate bitcoin payment adoption by merchants. The goal is twofold: 1) help merchants understand that they can eliminate 3% credit card fees by accepting bitcoin, and 2) empower bitcoiners to locally spread that message to merchants in a fun and memorable way. It’s been one month since we launched the Bitcoin Merchant Community and we’re off to a strong start: • 800+ Itty Bitty plushies for small businesses sent • Nearly 100 Discord participants • Dozens of Local Champion applications received • Money saved by business who prefer bitcoin to credit cards Read the full post here: https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/bitcoin-merchant-community-one-month (https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/bitcoin-merchant-community-one-month). https://www.bitcoinmerchantcommunity.org/ https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   11 Dec 2025

   Making Bitcoin Speak Human

   The existing bitcoin address ecosystem looks about as intimidating to newcomers as it could. They look like 1Aqv9KxZc2y7M8b for a reason, sure, but they’re far from necessary. Human Bitcoin Addresses (BIP 353) are a worthy replacement and a huge UX unlock for bitcoin. Read the full article here: https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/making-bitcoin-speak-human (https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/making-bitcoin-speak-human) Spiral (https://spiral.xyz/) has supported FOSS bitcoin since 2019, making bitcoin everyday money by improving security, privacy, and especially UX. That’s why we’re focused on how the next wave of users spend bitcoin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   12 Nov 2025

   Merchants Don’t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements

   Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin’s existence, there just haven’t been many places to spend it. This is why we’re spearheading a peer-to-peer community exclusively for merchants, one that is bitcoin service-agnostic, to promote the idea of bitcoin as everyday money: https://www.bitcoinmerchantcommunity.org/ The Bitcoin Merchant Community aims to help merchants understand how bitcoin lets them keep more from every sale, and empower bitcoiners to explain it in an approachable and relatable way. The community includes resources, conversation guides, and leave-behind materials anyone can use to spark local adoption—plus a Facebook group where merchants can connect, share experiences, and ask questions. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    23 Oct 2025

    Our Hopes and Dreams for Bitcoin Design

    Spiral Product Managers, Mat Balez and Conor Okus, outline a few long-term plans to grow the influence and impact of the Bitcoin Design Community. Read the full article on Spiral’s Substack: spiralbtc.substack.com FOLLOW: Mat Balez: https://x.com/matbalez Conor Okus: https://x.com/ConorOkus Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

11. 

    17 Sept 2025

    Lexe Uses LDK to Run Self-Custodial Lightning in Secure Enclaves

    Lexe CEO and Co-founder Max Fang wrote this case study on how Lexe, a self-custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet, runs inside secure Intel SGX enclaves to provide 24/7 reliability without ever holding users’ keys. By leveraging the modularity of LDK, Lexe overcame the technical constraints of enclaves to deliver seamless payments, constant uptime, and dramatically lower node hosting costs. This architecture solves the Lightning trilemma—combining self-custody, convenience, and low cost—while enabling free, enterprise-grade Lightning node hosting. Read the full article on Spiral’s Substack: spiralbtc.substack.com FOLLOW: Max Fang: https://x.com/MaxFangX, https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxfangx/ Lexe: https://x.com/lexeapp, https://www.linkedin.com/company/lexeapp/ Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc, https://www.linkedin.com/company/spiralbtc/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

12. 

    21 Aug 2025

    Nerd of the Month #5: A Castle of Glass, or, Rebuilding the Lightning Network's Foundations

    This post is written by Spiral grantee, Matt Morehouse (https://morehouse.github.io/), who is working on improving Lightning’s security and stability. Read the written version on our Substack: spiralbtc.substack.com FOLLOW: Matt Morehouse: https://morehouse.github.io/ Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

13. 

    31 Jul 2025

    2025 Q2 Spiral Progress Report

    We’re working on stuff. What stuff? This stuff. It’s a lot more stuff than we would like.Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

14. 

    17 Jul 2025

    Just a Lil Bitcoin Product Blog #2: Bringing ₿ to the World

    Spiral PM Mat Balez makes the case for using ₿ to represent all bitcoin quantities. He explores how today’s emphasis on “sats” could eventually edge the word “bitcoin” out of everyday payments entirely. Along the way, he unpacks product design, brand clarity, and why the humble ₿ might be key to onboarding the next billion users. FOLLOW: Mat Balez: https://x.com/matbalez, Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralbtc.substack.com (https://spiralbtc.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Contact Spiral: A Bitcoin Newsletter, Now in Audio

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