Article author, source: Evan Lu, Waterdrip Capital; Leo, AISA
Over the past century, the basic unit of economic activity has always been human beings. Whether it is production, trading, payment or financial services, they all revolve around human needs. However, the rise of AI technology is reshaping this landscape, allowing machines to gradually evolve from passive tools to "active economic entities" - AI Agents.
In addition, at the beginning of 2025; Tether announced the integration of USDT into the BTC ecosystem, covering its base layer and lightning network. Behind all these trends, a change 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 then to the current AI-driven application layer, the crypto industry is likely to usher in the paradigm innovation of AI + Pay Fi + BTC Infra, and force Web2 to self-reform to Web3 - the future of large-scale adoption is becoming a reality step by step.
The programmability, cross-border practicality and increasingly clear regulatory framework of stablecoins are expected to become the standard settlement currency for global payments. With the election of Trump, who is friendly to cryptocurrencies, as the US government will gradually provide regulatory clarity on cryptocurrencies, the application scenarios of stablecoins will gradually expand, and we can even estimate a beautiful vision of 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. Debit/credit cards related to cryptocurrencies (such as Visa/MasterCard) will simplify consumption and build 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 switch between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, providing customers with dual-track payment options.
Long term (7 years and above): Stablecoins will become mainstream legal tender, widely accepted for payments and even tax payments, completely subverting traditional financial infrastructure.
Beyond the convenience of payment, stablecoins still have quite positive effects in some other areas: for example, they provide entrepreneurs with an easier-to-access platform to develop new payment products: no middlemen, minimum balances, or proprietary SDKs. In addition, according to rough estimates, medium and large companies can increase their profits by 2% if they can use service providers with stablecoin solutions in their transactions. In addition, countries under US sanctions such as Russia have tried to use stablecoins for trade between countries to circumvent the US dollar settlement system. More and more cases show that stablecoins are gradually approaching the best position of their own market fit. This is not surprising - they are undoubtedly the most economical way to settle in US dollars and the fastest global payment.
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 change is not limited to AI-driven financial transactions and intelligent supply chain management, but also involves generative AI (AIGC) to provide services to content creators, developers and enterprises. Going further, AI agents can even "autonomously negotiate, trade, settle, and optimize their own resource utilization."
Just at the end of last year, we have seen AI Agents redefine the application scenarios of DApps. The pioneer of this trend is @truth_terminal, an AI Agent that can promote its issued token $Goat by itself; followed by AI Agents such as Luna and AIxbt, which can autonomously use tokens for transactions, generate content, and even manage their own crypto wallets and assets. The evolution of this capability has given rise to innovations in crypto narratives, such as Virtual Protocol, a protocol similar to Pump.fun, but the objects of its "Pump" are no longer simple tokens, but a variety of AI Agents.
The evolving capabilities of AI Agents, coupled with an out-of-the-box distribution platform, have opened up a market opportunity worth hundreds of billions of dollars for the concept of AI Agent + Crypto. AI is becoming an active participant in the on-chain ecosystem, pushing blockchain applications from tooling to ecology.
Top 10 AI Agent market capitalization rankings on Virtual Protocol, as of February 11, 2025, data source: https://app.virtuals.io/sentients?sortBy=mcapInVirtual&sortOrder=desc&page=1
In the future, AI will become the user experience layer of blockchain technology, connecting the application layer and blockchain infrastructure, and play a role both upward and downward in the technology stack. To give an example that is most understandable to crypto users, AI proactively recommends and executes on-chain DeFi operations based on the user's intentions and preferences (such as security, yield, etc.), combined with real-time information from the prediction market. Users do not need to understand the difference between L1 and L2, or even how the cross-chain bridge works. Expanding to daily life, imagine a scenario where an AI personal financial assistant can autonomously manage your tax, insurance, and rental income and expenditures, dynamically optimize your investment portfolio, and even automatically execute transactions based on market changes. Of course, while giving AI economic autonomy, security issues cannot be ignored. To this end, the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) has become its key infrastructure - it isolates the computing environment to ensure that the behavior of the AI Agent fully follows the preset logic and is not subject to external manipulation. For example, an AI Agent running in a TEE can attract users and earn income by generating content, and can also use encryption technology to ensure absolute control of its asset keys. 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 outlining a new "machine economy" landscape: from gamers to Depin managers, from content creators to financial strategists, AI Agents will become the core driving force of the on-chain ecology.
In the future, AI Agents will partially replace humans, become independent participants in the market, and form an important 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 to provide AI Agents with seamless economic interaction capabilities.
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 (such as Visa and PayPal), you will have to pay at least $0.30 in fees for each transaction, which means that for every $0.0001 in transactions, AI agents will have to pay 3,000 times the fees. This ridiculous cost structure directly leads to the inability of the AI economy to run on the existing payment system.
For AI agents, transactions are not sporadic events, but a continuous flow process. However, the settlement methods of traditional payment networks are extremely lagging:
· Credit card payments: usually take 1-3 days to complete settlement.
· SWIFT international transfers: may take 2-5 days.
· Cryptocurrency payments (such as Bitcoin main chain transactions): an average of 10 minutes or even longer.
The AI economy requires millisecond settlements, but the existing payment system is obviously unable to meet this requirement.
AI agents are global in nature and are not restricted by geographical boundaries. However, the traditional payment system is mired in issues such as bank accounts, fiat currency compliance, and regional payment rules.
· Bank account dependency: Most payment systems (such as Visa and PayPal) require the transacting parties to have bank accounts, and AI agents cannot open bank accounts like humans.
· Centralized control: The existing payment system relies on a small number of financial institutions for approval, and AI agent transactions may be rejected at any time due to regulatory or compliance issues.
· International payment barriers: AI agent cross-border transactions will encounter 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 restrictions and will not be able to truly unleash its potential.
Considering the possible operating characteristics and usage scenarios of the above AI Agents, the payment system serving AI in the future must have the following five core capabilities:
· Micropayment capability: AI agent transactions often involve extremely small amounts (such as $0.0001 level), and the handling fee must be extremely low, or even close to zero.
· Millisecond transaction settlement: AI transactions occur in sub-second time scales, and the payment system must be able to settle in real time, rather than waiting for 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 and avoid bank account dependence.
· Intelligent payment protocol: The payment system must be able to interact seamlessly with AI agents and support functions such as automatic settlement, intelligent transaction routing, and liquidity optimization.
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 the traditional payment system. However, mainstream blockchains still face the following problems:
ETH (Ethereum) is the most important infrastructure of DeFi (decentralized finance), but its high transaction costs make it difficult for the AI economy to adopt. When the network is congested, a simple USDT transaction may require $10-$50 in gas fees, and the transaction throughput is limited and the processing speed is slow, which makes it difficult to support the high-frequency trading needs of AI agents.
At present, a large number of high-performance public chains have emerged in the crypto ecosystem. These public chains do provide faster transaction processing capabilities, but they are often highly centralized and have security risks. In the past few years, some high-performance public chains have experienced downtime many times, affecting transaction stability. In addition, most public chains rely on only a few verification nodes, which is likely to affect the decentralized nature of the payment system.
BTC is the world's most secure and decentralized blockchain, with unrivaled security, but limited payment capabilities. The transaction throughput of the BTC mainnet is extremely low (only 7 transactions/second), and when encountering large transaction volume requests, its gas fee soars, making the transaction fee fluctuate greatly, which is not suitable for small payments of AI agents.
Therefore, although blockchain technology provides a possible solution, the existing public chain alone cannot fully meet the payment needs of the AI economy.
As the first second-layer expansion solution for BTC, 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 transaction capabilities through a two-way payment channel. This technical path is highly suitable for small-amount high-frequency payment scenarios, and it also meets the ideals of fundamentalist crypto enthusiasts 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 perfect. Before the emergence of the Taproot Assets protocol, the Lightning Network only supported BTC as a payment currency, and its application scenarios were extremely limited. Today, when BTC has become "digital gold", most people are not willing to spend their BTC easily. At this time, the importance of stablecoins is self-evident: throughout history, only currencies with stable value can be widely accepted and used in daily payment scenarios. For the technical principles of the Lightning Network and the TA protocol, please refer to this article: Taproot Assets: The next growth point for the stablecoin track to surpass the trillion-dollar market value.
There is no doubt that USDT issued by Tether is still the stablecoin overlord in the crypto world today. As of today, the total issuance of USDC is 56.3 billion US dollars, while the total issuance of USDT is over 140 billion US dollars, which is twice the issuance of the second largest USDC. This time Tether integrates USDT into the Lightning Network, which is of great significance. This behavior marks a kind of recognition in the eyes of users - after all, USDT is a real asset of gold and silver, and its casting 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 resources that all public chains dream of. This also marks that after years of construction, the era of the Lightning Network has come for it to really show its opportunities.
The explosive growth of AI Agent is giving birth to a trillion-level market of machine economy, but it is obvious that traditional payment networks (high cost, low speed) and existing blockchain solutions can hardly support its demand. It seems that the integration of USDT into the Lightning Network has provided the industry with a key puzzle piece - a nearly zero-cost, censorship-resistant payment channel, superimposed with the liquidity of stablecoins, and perfectly adapted to the micropayment and real-time transaction scenarios of AI agents.
Therefore, AISA was born. 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. The future AI economy does not need to wait - payment is efficiency, and transaction is intelligence.
The architecture of AISA can be divided into four core layers, which work together to enable AI agents to make payments freely and efficiently.
a. Settlement Layer
Based on the underlying network: BTC network (L1) + Lightning Network (L2). The core advantages of its settlement layer are:
Security: relying on Bitcoin's PoW mechanism and decentralized network (57,000+ nodes worldwide).
Efficiency: millisecond-level transaction confirmation, handling fees close to zero, completely solving the pain points of AI high-frequency micropayments
b. Payment Layer
Multi-chain support: compatible with public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and AI agents can freely choose the best chain.
Stablecoin integration: aiUSD (native stablecoin) issued by AISA itself circulates on the Lightning Network as payment currency through the Taproot Assets protocol with USDT and USDC.
c. Intelligent Payment Layer
AI Native Protocol (AIP): Give AI agents the ability to make independent decisions.
Dynamic routing: Real-time analysis of transaction fees and network congestion, and automatic switching of payment paths (such as Lightning Network → Solana).
Automated micropayments: On-demand settlement (e.g., $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: LPT token holders jointly govern and decide on protocol upgrades, fee allocation, etc.
Incentive mechanism: Liquidity providers pledge LPT to gain income (share of transaction fees). Part of the fees is used for token destruction to promote the deflation model.
AISA is not a simple extension of traditional blockchain payments, but a revolutionary infrastructure designed specifically for the AI economy. By integrating the decentralized efficiency of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, the liquidity guarantee of stablecoins, and the intelligent decision-making capabilities of AI native protocols, AISA has built a payment network with nearly zero cost and millisecond response, completely breaking through the high cost and inefficiency bottlenecks of the traditional system. Here, AI agents can independently complete micropayments (such as only $0.0001 per API call), settle DePIN node contribution rewards in real time, and even dynamically optimize cross-chain transaction paths without human intervention.
From cross-border corporate payments (replacing SWIFT to save costs) to high-frequency trading of automated financial strategies, AISA's adaptability is driving the rise of the machine economy - in the future, AI agents may manage taxes and investments independently to form an independent economic closed loop. Through multi-chain compatibility and DAO governance, AISA not only solves the fragmentation problem of the existing payment ecosystem, but also sets a new standard for human-machine collaboration in the decentralized era as a "financial operating system". When stablecoins become mainstream settlement tools and lightning networks connect global value flows, AISA's vision is to allow the machine economy to grow freely in a frictionless intelligent network.
When AI agents independently complete transactions, investments, and even pay taxes on the chain, payments are no longer tools, but the blood circulation system of the machine economy. Lightning Network provides blood vessels, stablecoins act as blood, and AI agents become the heart - this silent revolution, like lightning, lights up the future payment ecosystem. Future payments no longer belong to a certain institution or country, but to every autonomously operated AI and participating node. Here, code is law, efficiency is justice, and real innovation has just begun.
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