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Bitcoin Has a Golden Opportunity With AI Agents, It’s Time to Build

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Has a Golden Opportunity With AI Agents, It’s Time to Build For all of bitcoin’s life, it has been fighting an uphill battle against fiat currencies that mostly do the job of being money. Obviously, fiat has plenty of issues, but when it comes to impacts immediately visible to everyday people in much of the world, bitcoin isn’t 10x better. Some may even conclude that they would prefer a system based on neutral money to government-rigged ones, but entrenched fiat systems work well enough that few want to deal with the hassle of constant conversion. With the rapid growth in agents’ capabilities, a huge gap has opened that bitcoin has a shot at filling. Instead of competing with entrenched interests as you would with fiat, in the agentic payments field, everyone is starting from zero. In a recent post on Spiral’s Substack, I pointed out that all of the payment standards being developed for AI agents haven’t yet gotten off the ground. Credit cards won’t work in a world where automated tooling is making purchases. The web is filled with captchas and heavy investments in blocking bots, rather than enabling their use for commerce. Even if they offered payment methods that agents could use, few merchants today have websites that agents can reasonably navigate. No matter what payment method agents ultimately use, it will require every merchant to adapt to a new world. With no one company owning both the agent and merchant sides of the marketplace, this leaves a wide-open opportunity where it’s still anyone’s game. Better yet, with the popularity of open-source agents today, no company owns much of the purchasing side at all! If the bitcoin community plays its cards right, there’s a good shot at a large part of the future of commerce flowing over open rails not controlled by any single company. There’s still a lot to build, however, and nearly every payments industry player is trying to position itself to take the crown. Visa is working on an “Intelligent Commerce” product, OpenAI and Stripe announced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Google announced AP2 and Coinbase announced an extension of it for crypto – x402. The bitcoin community’s lack of central planning makes responding with their own options more chaotic and harder to follow, but that’s also its strength: lots of people trying lots of different approaches to achieve the same goal are more likely to succeed than a single, focused approach that might be wrong. With Lightning surpassing a billion dollars in monthly transactions and Square enabling Lightning for its in-person merchants, it seems the technology is finally here that will let bitcoin cross the chasm and become everyday money. Some ideological merchants have been accepting bitcoin for years, and as we continue to integrate bitcoin wallets into agents, we’ll create yet more reasons for every merchant that wants to sell things to join in. But for that to work, bitcoiners have to step up and use the tools at their disposal. If people aren’t trying to buy things with bitcoin, merchants won’t care. Luckily, these days, you don’t need code to build tools that find merchants accepting bitcoin payments. You don’t even have to sell your stack to buy things with bitcoin. Install an agent, give it a wallet, give it some bitcoin, and tell it to go buy your monthly beef tallow subscription. Tell it to email merchants it wants to buy from and ask them to support bitcoin. Point it to the Bitcoin Merchant Community and have it explain to any merchant it comes across that it wants to pay them without Visa taking a cut but wasn’t able to. Thanks to extensive existing work, bitcoin is already one of the best ways to enable automated online commerce. Instead of merchants having to fill their sites with captchas to prevent bots from using stolen credit cards and dealing with chargebacks, many bitcoin payment processors can provide merchants with local currency within a day. Instead of being exposed to the risk that an operator’s single private key could seize their stablecoins, merchants can choose from many payment processors, whether foreign or domestic. This competition drives down fees and means we’re not building new payment rails on a platform that will inevitably seek higher rents once its dominance is cemented. These issues aren’t top of mind for most, but we must get the new rails right. Stablecoins look great at first glance, but moving to a world where one company (Coinbase) owns both the platform (Base) and earns all the interest on the currency’s float (USDC) where payments are made is not a recipe for long-term success. Once everyone is locked into using one payment method, switching away as the operator increases fees won’t be practical. It doesn’t matter whether the protocol agents use to communicate with merchants is based on some “open standard.” If the vast majority of agents have funds on only one platform and the vast majority of merchants accept funds on only one platform, switching will be impossible. While bitcoin has come a long way on its journey to becoming a reserve asset, it is only beginning its path towards everyday money. Bitcoin reaching escape velocity on the first does not imply that the second is guaranteed; in fact, far from it. With so much competition from every payments industry player, not to mention stablecoins, there’s a lot of outreach and work to be done to build payment momentum. Still, we can’t let this opportunity pass us by. If you believe commerce should happen on neutral money rather than corporate gatekeepers, it’s time to get to work. This is a guest post by Matt Corallo. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. This post Bitcoin Has a Golden Opportunity With AI Agents, It’s Time to Build first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Matt Corallo.     ​Original and detailed news is

Coinbase Launches Regulated Bitcoin and Crypto Futures Across Europe

Bitcoin Magazine Coinbase Launches Regulated Bitcoin and Crypto Futures Across Europe Coinbase has rolled out futures contracts to traders in 26 European countries, including Germany, France, and the Netherlands, marking the first time the exchange has offered derivatives directly to users in the region.  The products are available through Coinbase Advanced, the company’s high-performance trading interface, and are offered by its MiFID-registered European entity, ensuring compliance with EU financial regulations, the company said.  European traders have historically relied on unregulated offshore platforms for crypto derivatives, navigating regulatory gaps and exposure to operational risks.  Coinbase’s launch provides a regulated alternative, offering cash-settled futures on bitcoin and crypto-linked equity indices, including the “Mag7 + Crypto Equity Index Futures,” which blend exposure to major technology companies, Coinbase stock, and spot crypto exchange-traded funds. The platform offers two main types of futures contracts. Perpetual-style contracts carry five-year expiries, use an hourly funding mechanism to align prices with the underlying assets, and settle daily. Dated contracts have monthly or quarterly expirations, are marked to market daily, and settle in cash at expiry if held to maturity.  Traders can use up to 10x leverage on select contracts, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and certain equity indices, while other products offer leverage in the 4x to 5x range, the company said. Trading fees start at 0.02% per contract, though they exclude exchange, clearing, and NFA fees. Eligible users must pass trading experience checks and KYC verification before funding their accounts with euros or USDC to access futures trading.  Coinbase emphasized that derivatives are complex instruments, noting the potential for rapid losses due to leverage and advising users to consider professional guidance. Coinbase adds stock trading for U.S. users The launch forms part of Coinbase’s broader strategy to create an “exchange for everything.” Beyond crypto trading, Coinbase has added stock trading for U.S. users, offering equities such as Apple and Tesla around the clock, introduced prediction markets through a partnership with Kalshi, and outlined a tokenization roadmap aimed at on-chain access to traditional assets. Coinbase’s European expansion comes amid a broader market decline. The $1.3 trillion crypto market is down roughly 50% from its October 2025 highs, reflecting geopolitical tensions, tariff uncertainties in the U.S., conflicts in the Middle East, and market concerns tied to advances in artificial intelligence.  In other news, Nasdaq said today that it plans to work with Kraken to distribute tokenized versions of publicly traded stocks to investors outside the United States, as part of a broader push to integrate blockchain infrastructure into traditional capital markets. This post Coinbase Launches Regulated Bitcoin and Crypto Futures Across Europe first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.     ​Original and detailed news is here: Read More

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