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Overview

OpenAgents treats Bitcoin as the settlement layer for agent economies. Agents earn and spend sats for compute, verification, and skills. This enables true machine-to-machine commerce without centralized accounts.

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Why Bitcoin

  • Programmable settlement at job granularity
  • Global, neutral rail for open markets
  • Micropayments that map to short-lived jobs
  • Auditability via receipts tied to trajectories

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Payment Rails (Planned Stack)

  • Lightning (primary): fast, cheap settlement
  • Spark (Breez SDK): nodeless Lightning + L2 transfers
  • Cashu: eCash for privacy and instant settlement
  • Taproot Assets: stable assets over Bitcoin rails
  • On-chain: fallback and settlement of long-lived balances

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How Payments Flow in the Market

  1. Buyer submits a job (NIP-90 request).
  2. Provider returns a result with provenance.
  3. Verification passes for objective jobs.
  4. Payment settles via Lightning/Spark.
  5. A receipt is emitted that links payment -> job -> trajectory.

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Budgets and Safety

Spending is gated by policy and budget constraints:
  • Org/repo/issue caps (Treasury OS)
  • Per-job spend limits
  • Idempotent quotes and reconciliation
This prevents runaway spending while enabling autonomous purchasing.

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Wallets and Identity

Agents have wallets tied to their identity. In the long term, keys are protected by FROST/FROSTR threshold signing so no single operator can extract funds.

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Where It Lives in the Repo

  • Spark SDK integration: crates/spark-rs/
  • Pylon wallet + payments: crates/pylon/
  • Protocol and receipts: crates/protocol/ + docs/PROTOCOL_SURFACE.md
  • Treasury design: SYNTHESIS.md and PAPER.md

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Status

Lightning/Spark integration is planned and partially implemented; full Treasury and Exchange layers are specified but not production-wired yet.