"AI + Lighting Network + stablecoin" Trio: Opening a New Era for Comprehensive BTC Ecosystem Payments.

Author: Evan Lu, Waterdrip Capital; Leo, AIS

Introduction

In the past century, the fundamental unit of economic activity has always been humans. Whether it is production, trade, payment, or financial services, everything revolves around human needs. However, the rise of AI technology is reshaping this landscape, allowing machines to gradually evolve from passive tools into "active economic agents" - AI Agents.

Moreover, on the occasion of the 2025 New Year, Tether announced the integration of USDT into the BTC ecosystem, covering its base layer and the Lightning Network. Behind various trends, a transformation is quietly brewing: AI Agent-driven payment infrastructure is pushing the crypto industry into a new wave of innovation with a breakthrough momentum. From the consensus layer of BTC to the execution layer of smart contracts, and now to the AI-driven application layer, the crypto industry is likely to welcome a paradigm innovation of AI + Pay Fi + BTC Infra, forcing Web2 to self-reform towards Web3—the future of large-scale adoption is gradually becoming a reality.

1. Stablecoins: The Cornerstone of a New Era in Global Payments - A Decade of Evolution from Cross-Border Revolution to Mainstream Currency

The programmability of stablecoins, their cross-border usability, and the increasingly clear regulatory framework are expected to become the standard settlement currency for global payments. With the election of the cryptocurrency-friendly Trump as the current President of the United States, the U.S. government will gradually provide regulatory clarity regarding cryptocurrencies, and the application scenarios for stablecoins will gradually expand. We can even estimate a bright vision for stablecoin payments in the next 10 years:

Short term (1–3 years): Stablecoins will dominate cross-border remittances, providing a faster and cheaper alternative to SWIFT. Cryptocurrency-linked debit/credit cards (such as Visa/MasterCard) will simplify spending, building a bridge between on-chain wealth and real-world transactions.

Medium term (3–7 years): Businesses will increasingly adopt stablecoin payments due to their low fees, instant settlement, and programmability. Companies will be able to seamlessly convert between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, offering customers a dual-track payment option.

Long-term (7 years and beyond): Stablecoins will become mainstream legal tender, widely accepted for payments and even tax payments, fundamentally disrupting traditional financial infrastructure.

Apart from the convenience of payments, stablecoins still play a quite positive role in other areas: for example, they provide entrepreneurs with an easier platform to develop new payment products: no intermediaries, minimum balances, or proprietary SDKs. In addition, it is roughly estimated that if medium and large enterprises can use service providers with stablecoin solutions in transactions, their profits could increase by 2%. Furthermore, countries like Russia that are sanctioned by the U.S. have already attempted to use stablecoins for trade between nations to bypass the dollar settlement system. An increasing number of cases indicate that stablecoins are gradually moving closer to their optimal market fit. This is not surprising— they are undoubtedly the most economical way to settle in dollars and the fastest global payment.

2.Next Level: AI Agents will be the new user experience layer for future apps.

Today, we no longer rely solely on AI to perform singular tasks such as image recognition, speech synthesis, or autonomous driving. Instead, we are entering an "era where AI agents become independent market participants." This shift is not limited to AI-driven financial trading and smart supply chain management; it also involves generative AI (AIGC) providing services for content creators, developers, and businesses. Furthermore, AI agents are even capable of "independently negotiating, trading, settling, and optimizing their own resource utilization."

At the end of last year, we already saw AI Agents redefining the application scenarios of DApps, with the pioneer of this trend being @truth_terminal, an AI Agent that can promote its issued token $Goat on its own; closely followed by AI Agents like Luna and AIxbt, which can autonomously use tokens for trading, generate content, and even manage their own cryptocurrency wallets and assets. This evolution of capability has given rise to innovations in narratives within the crypto space, such as Virtual Protocol—a protocol similar to Pump.fun, but whose "Pump" targets are no longer merely tokens, but various AI Agents.

The ever-evolving capabilities of AI Agents, combined with a ready-to-use issuance platform, have opened up a market opportunity in the trillion-dollar range for the concept of AI Agent + Crypto. AI is becoming an active participant in the on-chain ecosystem, driving blockchain applications from being tool-based to becoming ecosystem-oriented.

Top 10 AI Agent Market Capitalization Rankings on Virtual Protocol, as of February 11, 2025

Data Source:

In the future, AI will become the user experience layer of blockchain technology, serving as a link between the application layer and the blockchain infrastructure, functioning both upwards and downwards in the technology stack. To give an example that crypto users can easily understand, AI will proactively recommend and execute on-chain DeFi operations based on the user's intentions and preferences (such as security, yield, etc.), combined with real-time information from prediction markets. Users will not need to understand the differences between L1 and L2, nor will they need to know how cross-chain bridges work. Extending to daily life, imagine a scenario where an AI personal finance assistant can autonomously manage your taxes, insurance, and rent income and expenses, dynamically optimize your investment portfolio, and even automatically execute trades based on market changes. Of course, while granting economic autonomy to AI, security issues cannot be overlooked. For this reason, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) become a key infrastructure—it ensures that the AI Agent's behavior fully adheres to pre-set logic and is not subject to external manipulation by isolating the computing environment. For example, an AI Agent running in a TEE can attract users and generate income by creating content while ensuring absolute control over its asset keys through cryptographic techniques. Furthermore, AI can operate Depin nodes or verify data, becoming the core executor of its distributed system.

The workflows and application scenarios of these AI Agents are sketching out a whole new picture of the "machine economy": from gamers to Depin managers, from content creators to financial strategists, AI Agents will become the core driving force of the on-chain ecosystem.

3. The Dilemma of the Existing Payment System: The Invisible Shackles of the AI Economy

In the future, AI Agents will partially replace humans, becoming independent participants in the market and forming an important force. However, this revolution of the machine economy is not without challenges. One of the core issues is "payment." The realization of the AI revolution relies on an efficient, secure, and decentralized payment network built using blockchain technology, providing AI Agents with seamless economic interaction capabilities.

3.1 Economic Imbalance of Micro-Payments

Imagine a scenario where an AI agent is running a high-frequency trading strategy that needs to complete 1,000 transactions per second, with each transaction amount being only $0.0001. If you use traditional payment networks (e.g., Visa, PayPal), you will need to pay at least $0.30 per transaction, which means that the AI agent will pay 3,000 times the fee for every $0.0001 transaction. This ridiculous cost structure directly leads to the inability of the AI economy to run on existing payment systems.

3.2 Fatal Flaw in Settlement Speed

For AI agents, trading is not an occasional event but a continuous flow process. However, the settlement methods of traditional payment networks are extremely lagging behind:

Credit Card Payment: Usually takes 1-3 days to complete settlement.

SWIFT international transfer: It may take 2-5 days.

Cryptocurrency payments (such as Bitcoin main chain transactions): on average, take 10 minutes or even longer.

The AI economy requires millisecond-level settlement, but the existing payment systems obviously cannot meet this.

3.3 Limitations of Centralized Architecture

AI agents are essentially global and are not constrained by geographic boundaries. However, traditional payment systems are mired in issues such as bank accounts, fiat currency compliance, and regional payment rules.

Bank account dependency: Most payment systems (such as Visa, PayPal) require parties to have a bank account, while AI agents cannot open bank accounts like humans.

Centralized control: Existing payment systems rely on a few financial institutions for approval, and AI agent transactions can be rejected at any time due to regulatory or compliance issues.

International payment barriers: AI-powered cross-border transactions face cumbersome compliance requirements, increasing operational costs and complexity.

If the AI economy must rely on the existing payment system, it will be constrained by artificially set limitations and will not be able to truly unleash its potential.

3.4 Five Core Requirements of the AI Economic Payment System

Considering the possible operational characteristics and use scenarios of the above AI Agent, the payment system for AI services in the future must possess the following five core capabilities:

Micro-payment capability: AI agent transactions often involve very small amounts (such as $0.0001 level), and it is essential to ensure that transaction fees are extremely low, even approaching zero.

Millisecond-level transaction settlement: AI trading occurs within a sub-second time scale, and the payment system must be able to settle in real-time, rather than waiting for several minutes or even days.

Decentralization and Anti-Censorship: AI agents need to trade autonomously and cannot rely on centralized financial institutions.

Global availability: AI agents are not restricted by national borders, and the payment system must support cross-border transactions, avoiding reliance on bank accounts.

Intelligent Payment Protocol: The payment system must be able to seamlessly interact with AI agents, supporting automated settlement, smart trading routing, liquidity optimization, and other functions.

4. The Hope and Limitations of Blockchain Payment

In recent years, the rise of blockchain technology has brought a glimmer of hope to the AI economy. The decentralization, smart contracts, and permissionless transactions of blockchain make it an alternative to traditional payment systems. However, mainstream blockchains still face the following issues:

4.1 High costs of ETH network payments

ETH (Ethereum) is the main infrastructure for DeFi (Decentralized Finance), but its high transaction costs make it difficult for the AI economy to adopt. During network congestion, a simple USDT transaction may require $10-$50 in Gas fees, with limited transaction throughput and slow processing speeds, making it hard to support the high-frequency trading needs of AI agents.

4.2 The speed and centralization issues of other high-performance public chains

At present, a large number of high-performance public chains have emerged in the crypto ecosystem, and these public chains do provide faster transaction processing capabilities, but they tend to have a high degree of centralization and security risks. In the past few years, some high-performance public chains have experienced downtime many times, affecting the stability of transactions. In addition, most public blockchains rely on only a small number of validators, which greatly affects the decentralized nature of the payment system.

4.3 Scalability Bottleneck of the BTC Mainnet

BTC, as the world's most secure and decentralized blockchain, has unmatched security, but its payment capability is limited. The transaction throughput of the BTC mainnet is extremely low (only 7 transactions per second), and when faced with high transaction volume requests, its gas fees soar, resulting in significant fluctuations in transaction costs, making it unsuitable for small payments by AI agents.

Therefore, although blockchain technology offers a possible solution, existing public chains alone cannot fully meet the payment needs of the AI economy.

4.4 Lightning Network - A New Stage for Stablecoin Payments

As BTC's first Layer 2 scaling solution, the Lightning Network not only relies on the security of the BTC network (with 57,000+ nodes and PoW mechanism), but also realizes instant, low-cost and infinitely scalable transactions through two-way payment channels. This technical path is highly adaptable to small-value high-frequency payment scenarios, and is also in line with the ideals of fundamentalist crypto fanatics that all transactions are based on the BTC network. At present, the Lightning Network has 15,000+ nodes and 50,000+ channels, showing strong ecological potential.

However, the Lightning Network is not without its flaws. Before the emergence of the Taproot Assets protocol, the Lightning Network only supported BTC as the payment currency, making its application scenarios extremely limited. Today, as BTC has become "digital gold", most people are reluctant to easily spend their held BTC. At this point, the importance of stablecoins is self-evident: throughout history, only currencies with stable value can be widely accepted and used in everyday payment scenarios. For the technical principles of the Lightning Network and the TA protocol, you can refer to this article: Taproot Assets: The Next Growth Point in the Stablecoin Sector Surpassing a Trillion Market Value.

There is no doubt that the USDT issued by Tether is still the stablecoin hegemon in the crypto world today. As of today's data, the total issuance of USDC is $56.3 billion, while the total issuance of USDT is more than $140 billion, which is more than double that of the two largest issuances. Tether's integration of USDT into the Lightning Network is of great significance. This behavior marks a kind of recognition in the eyes of users - after all, USDT is a real money asset, and its minting means Tether's recognition of the security and ease of use of the public chain. More importantly, the real on-chain users and fee income brought by USDT are also the coveted resources of various public chains. This also marks the time when the Lightning Network has truly given its opportunity after years of construction.

5. Everything is ready, just waiting for the favorable wind to come.

The explosive growth of AI Agents is giving rise to a trillion-dollar machine economy landscape, but it is clear that traditional payment networks (high cost, low speed) and existing blockchain solutions struggle to meet its demands. The integration of USDT into the Lightning Network seems to provide a key piece of the puzzle for the industry—near-zero cost, censorship-resistant payment channels, combined with the liquidity of stablecoins, perfectly fits the micro-payment and real-time transaction scenarios of AI agents.

Therefore, AISA was born in response to the situation. It is not only a simple superposition of the technology stack, but also a "financial operating system" tailored for the AI economy, allowing the AI economy to truly break free from the shackles of payment and move towards the future of autonomous interaction. In the AI economy of the future, there is no need to wait – payment is efficiency, transaction is intelligence.

6.AISA: The Ultimate Fusion of Lightning Network, Stablecoins, and AI Agents - Restructuring the Payment Foundation of the AI Economy

6.1 The four-layer technical architecture of AIS

The architecture of AIsa can be divided into four core layers that work in synergy, allowing AI agents to make payments freely and efficiently.

a. Settlement Layer

Underlying network: BTC network (L1) + Lightning Network (L2). The core advantage of its settlement layer is:

Security: Based on Bitcoin's PoW mechanism and decentralized network (over 57,000 nodes worldwide).

Efficiency: Millisecond-level transaction confirmation, near-zero transaction fees, completely solves the pain points of AI high-frequency micropayments.

b. Payment Layer

Multi-chain support: Compatible with public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, etc., AI agents can freely choose the optimal chain.

Stablecoin Integration: AISA's own issued aiUSD (native stablecoin) circulates as a payment currency on the Lightning Network with USDT and USDC through the Taproot Assets protocol.

c. Intelligent Payment Layer (Programmable Layer)

AI Native Protocol (AIP): Empowering AI agents with autonomous decision-making capabilities.

Dynamic Routing: Real-time analysis of transaction fees and network congestion, automatically switching payment paths (e.g., Lightning Network → Solana).

Automated micropayments: on-demand settlement (e.g., pay $0.0001 for each API call), without manual intervention.

Liquidity Management: AI agents can dynamically allocate funds to liquidity pools to optimize payment efficiency.

d. Governance Layer

DAO Mechanism: Governed collectively by LPT token holders, deciding on protocol upgrades, fee distribution, etc.

Incentive Mechanism: Liquidity providers stake LPT to earn rewards (transaction fee sharing). A portion of the transaction fees is used for token burns, promoting a deflationary model.

6.2 How does AISA redefine AI economic payments?

AISA is not a simple extension of traditional blockchain payments but a revolutionary infrastructure specifically designed for the AI economy. By integrating the decentralized efficiency of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, the liquidity guarantees of stablecoins, and the intelligent decision-making capabilities of AI-native protocols, AISA has built a payment network with nearly zero cost and millisecond-level response, completely breaking through the high-cost and low-efficiency bottlenecks of traditional systems. Here, AI agents can autonomously complete micropayments (such as $0.0001 for each API call), settle DePIN node contribution rewards in real time, and even dynamically optimize cross-chain transaction paths without human intervention.

From cross-border enterprise payments (cost-saving alternatives to SWIFT) to automated financial strategies in high-frequency trading, AISA's adaptability is driving the rise of the machine economy—where in the future, AI agents may independently manage taxes and investments, forming an independent economic closed loop. Through multi-chain compatibility and DAO governance, AISA not only addresses the fragmentation issues of the existing payment ecosystem but also sets a new standard for human-machine collaboration in the decentralized era as a "financial operating system." As stablecoins become mainstream settlement tools and the lightning network connects global value flows, AISA's vision is to allow the machine economy to thrive freely in a frictionless intelligent network.

7. Conclusion

When AI agents autonomously complete transactions, investments, and even pay taxes on-chain, payments are no longer tools, but the blood circulation system of the machine economy. The Lightning Network provides the blood vessels, the stablecoin acts as the blood, and the AI agent becomes the heart – this silent revolution will light up the future payment ecosystem like lightning. The future of payment does not belong to a certain institution or country, but belongs to every node that operates autonomously and participates in the co-construction. Here, code is law, efficiency is justice, and real innovation is just beginning.