Block Bolsters Agentic Payments with Bitcoin Lightning Support
Block, led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has joined forces with x402 Foundation and contributed Bitcoin Lightning support to its open payment protocol. This move aims to expand the available non-card payment methods supported by an open standard.
x402 is an open standard for agentic payments that uses HTTP 402 responses so AI agents can pay automatically for APIs and services. The protocol has already seen substantial activity with 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million in volume over the past thirty days, according to its official site.
Block's contribution introduces Bitcoin Lightning as another payment option inside the x402 framework. This is designed for 'instant, low-cost, high-volume payments,' which would be particularly useful for agents making billions of small payments, according to Steve Lee, head of Block's Bitcoin development initiative Spiral.