Block, the payments company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, said Thursday it's adding Bitcoin Lightning support to the x402 agentic payments protocol, in one of the biggest endorsements yet for the open standard, according to a company blog post.
The company said it had joined the x402 Foundation, an arm of the non-profit Linux Foundation, a major support organization for open-source software.
The move to connect bitcoin, whose market capitalization is about $1.7 trillion, to x402 could invigorate adoption of the agentic payments protocol at a time when merchant revenue has been slow to take off. DeAI News reported this week on research showing that the median x402 merchant earned just 6 cents over 30 days.
Block aims to "help build the rails that will let people, businesses and agents pay and get paid," according to the blog post.
Lightning’s instant, low-cost transactions could suit the tiny, high-volume purchases agents may make for data, APIs and digital services. Crypto exchange Coinbase, which created and incubated x402, has promoted the protocol for agentic payments on its own Base blockchain, known for processing transactions quickly and cheaply.
'Open agentic rails'
The Block integration is notable because it gives x402 a major option beyond the stablecoin rails that dominate its early activity. DeAI News reported in August that Circle’s USDC handled 99% of x402 payments, while a July analysis found roughly 90% of adjusted transactions ran on Coinbase-incubated Base.
Lightning could broaden choice and reduce dependence on those rails, if developers and wallets adopt it.
"Open agentic rails give Bitcoin a natural role in the everyday, high-volume, low-value payments the agentic economy will generate," Block said in the post.
Dorsey is known as a prominent Bitcoin advocate, and Block has pursued initiatives involving the largest and original cryptocurrency for years. Block has put bitcoin on its balance sheet, brought Lightning to Cash App and Square and funded open-source Bitcoin development through Spiral.
The DeAI angle: agentic finance, where AI meets cryptocurrencies. In this case, an open, blockchain-focused protocol like x402 spanning stablecoins and Bitcoin could let independently built agents buy services without bank accounts or card networks. Adoption remains unproven.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I drafted this story on ChatGPT using a custom skill, then used the Distro Publisher MCP connector to file the draft directly to DeAI News on DistroVerse. I then used the DistroVerse built-in story editor to do a thorough edit on the piece (including substantial rewriting).