From the consensus layer of BTC to the execution layer of smart contracts, and now to the AI-driven application layer, the cryptocurrency industry is likely to witness a paradigm shift towards AI + PayFi + BTC Infra. This shift will compel Web2 to reinvent itself into Web3, as the future of large-scale adoption is gradually becoming a reality.

Introduction

For the past century, the fundamental unit of economic activity has always been human beings. Whether it is production, trade, payment, or financial services, everything has been centered around human needs. However, the rise of AI technology is reshaping this landscape, transforming machines from passive tools into "active economic agents"—AI Agents.

Moreover, as the New Year of 2025 approached, Tether announced the integration of USDT into the BTC ecosystem, covering its base layer and the Lightning Network. Behind these trends, a transformation is quietly brewing: AI Agent-driven payment infrastructure is breaking through and propelling the cryptocurrency industry into a new wave of innovation. From the consensus layer of BTC to the execution layer of smart contracts, and now to the AI-driven application layer, the cryptocurrency industry is likely to witness a paradigm shift towards AI + PayFi + BTC Infra. This shift will compel Web2 to reinvent itself into Web3, as the future of large-scale adoption is gradually becoming a reality.

Stablecoins: The Cornerstone of a New Global Payment Era—From Cross-Border Revolution to Mainstream Currency in a Decade

The programmability, cross-border usability, and increasingly clear regulatory framework of stablecoins are poised to make them the standard settlement currency for global payments. With the crypto-friendly Trump elected as the President of the United States, the U.S. government is expected to gradually provide regulatory clarity for cryptocurrencies. The application scenarios for stablecoins will expand, and we can even envision a bright future for stablecoin payments over the next decade:

Short term (1–3 years): Stablecoins will dominate cross-border remittances, offering a faster and cheaper alternative to SWIFT. Debit/credit cards related to cryptocurrencies (such as Visa/MasterCard) will simplify consumption, bridging the gap between on-chain wealth and real-world transactions.

Medium term (3–7 years): Companies 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 dual payment options.

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

In addition to the convenience of payments, stablecoins also play a very positive role in other areas: For example, they provide entrepreneurs with an easier platform to develop new payment products, with no middlemen, minimum balances, or proprietary SDKs. Moreover, a rough estimate suggests that if medium and large enterprises use stablecoin solutions from service providers in their transactions, their profits could increase by 2%. Furthermore, countries under U.S. sanctions, such as Russia, have already experimented with using stablecoins for international trade to bypass the U.S. dollar settlement system. An increasing number of cases indicate that stablecoins are gradually finding their optimal market fit. This is not surprising—they are undoubtedly the most economical way to use U.S. dollar settlements and the fastest global payment method.

Next Level: AI Agents as the New User Experience Layer for Future Apps

Today, we no longer rely solely on AI to perform single 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 transactions, intelligent supply chain management, but also involves generative AI (AIGC) providing services for content creators, developers, and businesses. Furthermore, AI agents can even "negotiate, trade, settle, and optimize their own resource utilization autonomously."

Just last year, we saw AI Agents redefine the application scenarios of DApps, with pioneers like @truth_terminal, an AI Agent that could promote its own issued token $Goat; followed by Luna and AIxbt, which could autonomously trade tokens, generate content, and even manage their own crypto wallets and assets. This evolution of capabilities has given rise to innovative narratives in the crypto space, such as the Virtual Protocol—a protocol similar to Pump.fun, but instead of "pumping" tokens, it focuses on various AI Agents.

The evolving capabilities of AI Agents, combined with out-of-the-box issuance platforms, have opened up market opportunities worth hundreds of billions 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 ecosystem-oriented.

The Triad of AI, Lightning Network, and Stablecoins: A New Era for the Comprehensive Adoption of BTC Ecosystem Payments

Top 10 AI Agent Market Cap Ranking on Virtual Protocol as of February 11, 2025. Data source: Virtuals Protocol

In the future, AI will become the user experience layer of blockchain technology, the link between the application layer and blockchain infrastructure, acting 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 user intentions and preferences (such as security, returns, etc.), combined with real-time information from prediction markets. Users will not need to understand the differences between L1 and L2, or even how cross-chain bridges work. Expanding to daily life, imagine a scenario where an AI personal finance assistant can autonomously manage your taxes, insurance, and rent payments, dynamically optimize your investment portfolio, and even execute trades automatically based on market changes. Of course, while granting AI economic autonomy, security issues cannot be ignored. For this reason, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) will become a key infrastructure—it isolates the computing environment to ensure that AI Agents' actions strictly follow predefined logic and are not subject to external manipulation. For example, an AI Agent running in a TEE can attract users and earn income by generating content, while also ensuring absolute control over its asset keys through encryption. Going further, 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 painting a new picture of a "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.

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

In the future, AI Agents will partially replace humans as independent participants in the market and form a significant force. However, this machine economy revolution is not without challenges. One of the most core issues is "payment." The realization of the AI revolution is inseparable from an efficient, secure, and decentralized payment network built with blockchain technology, which provides seamless economic interaction capabilities for AI Agents.

Micro-Payment Economic Imbalance

Imagine this scenario: an AI agent is running a high-frequency trading strategy, requiring 1,000 transactions per second, with each transaction amounting to only $0.0001. If using traditional payment networks (such as Visa, PayPal), each transaction would incur a minimum fee of $0.30. This means that for every $0.0001 transaction, the AI agent would have to pay 3,000 times the transaction amount in fees. This absurd cost structure directly prevents the AI economy from operating on the existing payment system.

Fatal Flaw of Settlement Speed

For AI agents, transactions are not sporadic events but a continuous flow. However, traditional payment networks' settlement methods are extremely slow:

• Credit card payments: typically take 1–3 days to settle.

• SWIFT international transfers: may take 2–5 days.

• Cryptocurrency payments (such as Bitcoin mainnet transactions): average settlement time is 10 minutes or even longer.

The AI economy requires millisecond-level settlement, which the existing payment system clearly cannot meet.

Limitations of Centralized Architecture

AI agents are inherently global, not restricted by geographical boundaries. However, traditional payment systems are deeply entangled in issues such as bank accounts, fiat currency compliance, and regional payment regulations.

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

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

• International payment barriers: Cross-border transactions of AI agents will face cumbersome compliance requirements, increasing operational costs and complexity.

If the AI economy must rely on the existing payment system, it will be bound by artificially set limitations and unable to truly unleash its potential.

Five Core Needs for the AI Economy Payment System

Considering the possible operating characteristics and use cases of AI agents, the payment system serving AI in the future must have the following five core capabilities:

• Micro-payment capability: AI agents' transactions often involve extremely small amounts (such as at the $0.0001 level), and it is essential to ensure that transaction fees are extremely low, or even close to zero.

• Millisecond-level transaction settlement: AI transactions occur on 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 censorship resistance: AI agents need to trade autonomously, without relying on centralized financial institutions.

• Global availability: AI agents are not restricted by national borders, and the payment system must support cross-border transactions and avoid bank account dependency.

• Intelligent payment protocol: The payment system must be able to interact seamlessly with AI agents, supporting functions such as automatic settlement, intelligent transaction routing, and liquidity optimization.

The Hope and Limitations of Blockchain Payments

In the past few 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:

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 unsuitable for the high-frequency trading needs of AI agents.

Speed and Centralization Issues of Other High-Performance Public Chains

The current crypto ecosystem has seen the emergence of many high-performance public chains, which indeed offer faster transaction processing capabilities. However, they are often highly centralized and pose security risks. In the past few years, some high-performance public chains have experienced multiple outages, affecting transaction stability. Moreover, most public chains rely on a small number of validation nodes, which greatly affects the decentralization attribute of the payment system.

Scalability Bottlenecks of BTC Mainnet

BTC is the safest and most decentralized blockchain in the world, with unmatched security. However, its payment capabilities are limited. The transaction throughput of the BTC mainnet is extremely low (only 7 transactions per second), and when there is a large volume of transaction requests, gas fees soar, causing significant transaction cost fluctuations, making it unsuitable for small payments by AI agents.

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

Lightning Network—A New Stage for Stablecoin Payments

As the first layer-two scaling solution for BTC, the Lightning Network not only relies on the security of the BTC network (with over 57,000 nodes and a PoW mechanism) but also achieves instant, low-cost, and infinitely scalable transaction capabilities through bidirectional payment channels. This technological approach is highly suitable for small and high-frequency payment scenarios and also aligns with the ideals of crypto purists—all transactions are based on the BTC network. Currently, the Lightning Network has over 15,000 nodes and 50,000 channels, demonstrating strong ecosystem potential.

However, the Lightning Network is not perfect. Before the emergence of the Taproot Assets protocol, the Lightning Network only supported BTC as the payment currency, severely limiting its application scenarios. Today, with BTC becoming the "digital gold," most people are reluctant to spend their held BTC. At this point, the importance of stablecoins is self-evident: historically, only currencies with stable value have been widely accepted and used in everyday payment scenarios. For more information on the technical principles of the Lightning Network and the TA protocol, refer to this article: Taproot Assets: The Next Growth Point for Stablecoins to Surpass Trillion Market Value.

Undoubtedly, USDT issued by Tether is still the dominant stablecoin in the crypto world. As of today's data, the total issuance of USDC is $56.3 billion, while the total issuance of USDT is over $140 billion, more than twice that of USDC. This move by Tether to integrate USDT into the Lightning Network is of great significance. In the eyes of users, this marks a kind of recognition—after all, USDT is an asset backed by real money, and its issuance implies Tether's recognition of the security and usability of public chains. More importantly, the real on-chain users and transaction fee revenue brought by USDT are resources that all public chains have longed for. This also signifies that after years of development, the Lightning Network has truly entered an era where it can shine.

All Conditions Are Ready, Only Waiting for the Favorable Wind

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 costs, low speeds) and existing blockchain solutions are struggling to meet the demand. It seems that the integration of USDT into the Lightning Network has provided a key piece of the puzzle for the industry—near-zero-cost, censorship-resistant payment channels, combined with the liquidity of stablecoins, perfectly match the micro-payment and real-time trading scenarios of AI agents.

Therefore, AISA was born in response to the trend. It is not just a simple stacking of technology stacks, but a "financial operating system" tailor-made for the AI economy, allowing the AI economy to truly break free from the shackles of payment and move towards a future of autonomous interaction. In the future AI economy, there is no need to wait—payment is efficiency, and transactions are intelligence.

From the consensus layer of BTC to the execution layer of smart contracts, and now to the AI-driven application layer, the cryptocurrency industry is likely to witness a paradigm shift towards AI + PayFi + BTC Infra. This shift will compel Web2 to reinvent itself into Web3, as the future of large-scale adoption is gradually becoming a reality.

Introduction

For the past century, the fundamental unit of economic activity has always been human beings. Whether it is production, trade, payment, or financial services, everything has been centered around human needs. However, the rise of AI technology is reshaping this landscape, transforming machines from passive tools into "active economic agents"—AI Agents.

Moreover, as the New Year of 2025 approached, Tether announced the integration of USDT into the BTC ecosystem, covering its base layer and the Lightning Network. Behind these trends, a transformation is quietly brewing: AI Agent-driven payment infrastructure is breaking through and propelling the cryptocurrency industry into a new wave of innovation. From the consensus layer of BTC to the execution layer of smart contracts, and now to the AI-driven application layer, the cryptocurrency industry is likely to witness a paradigm shift towards AI + PayFi + BTC Infra. This shift will compel Web2 to reinvent itself into Web3, as the future of large-scale adoption is gradually becoming a reality.

Stablecoins: The Cornerstone of a New Global Payment Era—From Cross-Border Revolution to Mainstream Currency in a Decade

The programmability, cross-border usability, and increasingly clear regulatory framework of stablecoins are poised to make them the standard settlement currency for global payments. With the crypto-friendly Trump elected as the President of the United States, the U.S. government is expected to gradually provide regulatory clarity for cryptocurrencies. The application scenarios for stablecoins will expand, and we can even envision a bright future for stablecoin payments over the next decade:

Short term (1–3 years): Stablecoins will dominate cross-border remittances, offering a faster and cheaper alternative to SWIFT. Debit/credit cards related to cryptocurrencies (such as Visa/MasterCard) will simplify consumption, bridging the gap between on-chain wealth and real-world transactions.

Medium term (3–7 years): Companies 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 dual payment options.

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

In addition to the convenience of payments, stablecoins also play a very positive role in other areas: For example, they provide entrepreneurs with an easier platform to develop new payment products, with no middlemen, minimum balances, or proprietary SDKs. Moreover, a rough estimate suggests that if medium and large enterprises use stablecoin solutions from service providers in their transactions, their profits could increase by 2%. Furthermore, countries under U.S. sanctions, such as Russia, have already experimented with using stablecoins for international trade to bypass the U.S. dollar settlement system. An increasing number of cases indicate that stablecoins are gradually finding their optimal market fit. This is not surprising—they are undoubtedly the most economical way to use U.S. dollar settlements and the fastest global payment method.

Next Level: AI Agents as the New User Experience Layer for Future Apps

Today, we no longer rely solely on AI to perform single 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 transactions, intelligent supply chain management, but also involves generative AI (AIGC) providing services for content creators, developers, and businesses. Furthermore, AI agents can even "negotiate, trade, settle, and optimize their own resource utilization autonomously."

Just last year, we saw AI Agents redefine the application scenarios of DApps, with pioneers like @truth_terminal, an AI Agent that could promote its own issued token $Goat; followed by Luna and AIxbt, which could autonomously trade tokens, generate content, and even manage their own crypto wallets and assets. This evolution of capabilities has given rise to innovative narratives in the crypto space, such as the Virtual Protocol—a protocol similar to Pump.fun, but instead of "pumping" tokens, it focuses on various AI Agents.

The evolving capabilities of AI Agents, combined with out-of-the-box issuance platforms, have opened up market opportunities worth hundreds of billions 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 ecosystem-oriented.

The Triad of AI, Lightning Network, and Stablecoins: A New Era for the Comprehensive Adoption of BTC Ecosystem Payments

Top 10 AI Agent Market Cap Ranking on Virtual Protocol as of February 11, 2025. Data source: Virtuals Protocol

In the future, AI will become the user experience layer of blockchain technology, the link between the application layer and blockchain infrastructure, acting 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 user intentions and preferences (such as security, returns, etc.), combined with real-time information from prediction markets. Users will not need to understand the differences between L1 and L2, or even how cross-chain bridges work. Expanding to daily life, imagine a scenario where an AI personal finance assistant can autonomously manage your taxes, insurance, and rent payments, dynamically optimize your investment portfolio, and even execute trades automatically based on market changes. Of course, while granting AI economic autonomy, security issues cannot be ignored. For this reason, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) will become a key infrastructure—it isolates the computing environment to ensure that AI Agents' actions strictly follow predefined logic and are not subject to external manipulation. For example, an AI Agent running in a TEE can attract users and earn income by generating content, while also ensuring absolute control over its asset keys through encryption. Going further, 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 painting a new picture of a "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.

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

In the future, AI Agents will partially replace humans as independent participants in the market and form a significant force. However, this machine economy revolution is not without challenges. One of the most core issues is "payment." The realization of the AI revolution is inseparable from an efficient, secure, and decentralized payment network built with blockchain technology, which provides seamless economic interaction capabilities for AI Agents.

Micro-Payment Economic Imbalance

Imagine this scenario: an AI agent is running a high-frequency trading strategy, requiring 1,000 transactions per second, with each transaction amounting to only $0.0001. If using traditional payment networks (such as Visa, PayPal), each transaction would incur a minimum fee of $0.30. This means that for every $0.0001 transaction, the AI agent would have to pay 3,000 times the transaction amount in fees. This absurd cost structure directly prevents the AI economy from operating on the existing payment system.

Fatal Flaw of Settlement Speed

For AI agents, transactions are not sporadic events but a continuous flow. However, traditional payment networks' settlement methods are extremely slow:

• Credit card payments: typically take 1–3 days to settle.

• SWIFT international transfers: may take 2–5 days.

• Cryptocurrency payments (such as Bitcoin mainnet transactions): average settlement time is 10 minutes or even longer.

The AI economy requires millisecond-level settlement, which the existing payment system clearly cannot meet.

Limitations of Centralized Architecture

AI agents are inherently global, not restricted by geographical boundaries. However, traditional payment systems are deeply entangled in issues such as bank accounts, fiat currency compliance, and regional payment regulations.

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

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

• International payment barriers: Cross-border transactions of AI agents will face cumbersome compliance requirements, increasing operational costs and complexity.

If the AI economy must rely on the existing payment system, it will be bound by artificially set limitations and unable to truly unleash its potential.

Five Core Needs for the AI Economy Payment System

Considering the possible operating characteristics and use cases of AI agents, the payment system serving AI in the future must have the following five core capabilities:

• Micro-payment capability: AI agents' transactions often involve extremely small amounts (such as at the $0.0001 level), and it is essential to ensure that transaction fees are extremely low, or even close to zero.

• Millisecond-level transaction settlement: AI transactions occur on 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 censorship resistance: AI agents need to trade autonomously, without relying on centralized financial institutions.

• Global availability: AI agents are not restricted by national borders, and the payment system must support cross-border transactions and avoid bank account dependency.

• Intelligent payment protocol: The payment system must be able to interact seamlessly with AI agents, supporting functions such as automatic settlement, intelligent transaction routing, and liquidity optimization.

The Hope and Limitations of Blockchain Payments

In the past few 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:

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 unsuitable for the high-frequency trading needs of AI agents.

Speed and Centralization Issues of Other High-Performance Public Chains

The current crypto ecosystem has seen the emergence of many high-performance public chains, which indeed offer faster transaction processing capabilities. However, they are often highly centralized and pose security risks. In the past few years, some high-performance public chains have experienced multiple outages, affecting transaction stability. Moreover, most public chains rely on a small number of validation nodes, which greatly affects the decentralization attribute of the payment system.

Scalability Bottlenecks of BTC Mainnet

BTC is the safest and most decentralized blockchain in the world, with unmatched security. However, its payment capabilities are limited. The transaction throughput of the BTC mainnet is extremely low (only 7 transactions per second), and when there is a large volume of transaction requests, gas fees soar, causing significant transaction cost fluctuations, making it unsuitable for small payments by AI agents.

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

Lightning Network—A New Stage for Stablecoin Payments

As the first layer-two scaling solution for BTC, the Lightning Network not only relies on the security of the BTC network (with over 57,000 nodes and a PoW mechanism) but also achieves instant, low-cost, and infinitely scalable transaction capabilities through bidirectional payment channels. This technological approach is highly suitable for small and high-frequency payment scenarios and also aligns with the ideals of crypto purists—all transactions are based on the BTC network. Currently, the Lightning Network has over 15,000 nodes and 50,000 channels, demonstrating strong ecosystem potential.

However, the Lightning Network is not perfect. Before the emergence of the Taproot Assets protocol, the Lightning Network only supported BTC as the payment currency, severely limiting its application scenarios. Today, with BTC becoming the "digital gold," most people are reluctant to spend their held BTC. At this point, the importance of stablecoins is self-evident: historically, only currencies with stable value have been widely accepted and used in everyday payment scenarios. For more information on the technical principles of the Lightning Network and the TA protocol, refer to this article: Taproot Assets: The Next Growth Point for Stablecoins to Surpass Trillion Market Value.

Undoubtedly, USDT issued by Tether is still the dominant stablecoin in the crypto world. As of today's data, the total issuance of USDC is $56.3 billion, while the total issuance of USDT is over $140 billion, more than twice that of USDC. This move by Tether to integrate USDT into the Lightning Network is of great significance. In the eyes of users, this marks a kind of recognition—after all, USDT is an asset backed by real money, and its issuance implies Tether's recognition of the security and usability of public chains. More importantly, the real on-chain users and transaction fee revenue brought by USDT are resources that all public chains have longed for. This also signifies that after years of development, the Lightning Network has truly entered an era where it can shine.

All Conditions Are Ready, Only Waiting for the Favorable Wind

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 costs, low speeds) and existing blockchain solutions are struggling to meet the demand. It seems that the integration of USDT into the Lightning Network has provided a key piece of the puzzle for the industry—near-zero-cost, censorship-resistant payment channels, combined with the liquidity of stablecoins, perfectly match the micro-payment and real-time trading scenarios of AI agents.

Therefore, AISA was born in response to the trend. It is not just a simple stacking of technology stacks, but a "financial operating system" tailor-made for the AI economy, allowing the AI economy to truly break free from the shackles of payment and move towards a future of autonomous interaction. In the future AI economy, there is no need to wait—payment is efficiency, and transactions are intelligence.