GoBTC Pay, the Bitcoin payment protocol built by mining company GoMining, joined Agentic Commerce Pioneers Edition II: The Shopping Agent Challenge as a Diamond Sponsor. The hackathon, hosted by Agnic.AI, ran as a remote build sprint from September 10 to 20, 2026, and closed with a hybrid Demo Day in Toronto, Canada, on September 21.
The organizers set a single, demanding brief: build an AI agent that can buy from almost any merchant. Teams on the GoBTC Pay track worked from a company-supplied case study and were required to ship a functional prototype running on the protocol rather than a concept presentation. The field included student developers, machine learning engineers, independent specialists, and corporate teams.
Roman Yermoshin, General Manager at GoBTC Pay and a judge at the hackathon, framed the stakes plainly:
“Before long, people will stop placing orders themselves. Their AI agents will take that routine over: the agents will choose the products and pay for the orders on our behalf. Agents will also start settling up with each other for the services they provide to one another, and they will do it in Bitcoin, a genuinely independent international currency. GoBTC Pay gives agents a way to make those payments instantly and at minimal cost, with no banks or intermediaries in between. The hackathon with Agnic.AI is a demonstration of how that will work in practice.”
Why Card Rails Weren’t Built for AI Agents
The GoBTC Pay track exists because agent-driven commerce breaks a foundational assumption baked into card networks: that a person is standing at the checkout to approve the payment. When an AI agent is doing the buying, that assumption no longer holds.
Agent commerce also creates a category of transaction that barely exists today — one agent paying another for a task it has just completed. These payments tend to be small, frequent, and cross-border. They have no cardholder, no shared banking hours, and no dispute desk to fall back on.
The structural mismatch runs deeper than authorization. Traditional card networks operate on batch settlement processes, with credit cards settling between T+1 and T+3 days, involving numerous intermediaries and high fees. That works adequately for human consumption but is far too slow for a machine economy. Card networks also don’t support high-frequency microtransactions, while AI agent economies are characterized by per-second settlements, sub-cent payments, and API-triggered automation.
The numbers tell the story of where this is heading. Morgan Stanley estimates that AI agents could handle up to $385 billion of US e-commerce spending by 2030**. Juniper Research projects the total agentic commerce transaction value will grow from **$8 billion in 2026 to $3.5 trillion by 2031 — a 43,240% increase in five years.
How the GoBTC Pay Protocol Works
GoBTC Pay is a Layer-1 Bitcoin payment protocol developed by GoMining, a bitcoin mining company serving over 5.5 million users and running its own mining pool and data center capacity. The product launched in May 2026 and opened to third parties in June 2026 with the Gen1 SDK and API, moving it from a closed demonstration into open infrastructure that merchants, wallet providers, and ecosystem partners can integrate.
Settlement and Fees
GoBTC Pay settles directly on the Bitcoin base layer instead of converting to fiat currency by default. Payments are free for the payer, and merchants pay a 0.2% fee that is split between the wallet provider and the miners that process the settlement. The 0.2% fee is redistributed back into the ecosystem, with 50% going to miners and 50% to the wallet provider initiating the payment.
Custody and Security
The protocol uses a 2-of-3 multi-signature setup shared between the user, GoMining, and a regulated third-party custodian, so the payer holds a key throughout the transaction. This non-custodial design gives users control superior to that of a standard custodial wallet.
Routing and Settlement Speed
Transactions are routed through GoMining’s private mempool, built on the Stratum V2 mining protocol, which gives them priority inside GoMining’s own pool. The private mempool operates at 15 EH/s and prioritizes GoBTC Pay transactions over standard mempool traffic, targeting an average settlement window of about 12 hours.
The Broader Agentic Commerce Landscape
GoBTC Pay’s hackathon track lands in a rapidly maturing field. Several major payment players have moved aggressively into agentic commerce in 2026.
Visa launched Intelligent Commerce Connect, a solution that lets merchants accept agentic transactions through a single integration, supporting protocols including Trusted Agent Protocol, Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
Mastercard expanded its agentic commerce capabilities with tools that allow AI agents to discover products and complete transactions, with companies including Fiserv, Global Payments, Samsung, and Worldline exploring its offerings.
Stripe launched an Agentic Commerce Suite covering discovery, checkout, settlement, fraud, and financial infrastructure, positioning itself as a full-stack vendor for the agent commerce stack.
GoCardless processed the UK’s first live agentic account-to-account payment in September 2026, using an AI-guided checkout to process a recurring donation to the anti-poverty charity Trussell.
On the crypto-native side, Block (Jack Dorsey’s fintech firm) added Bitcoin Lightning support to the x402 payment protocol for AI agents, enabling fast, low-cost Bitcoin payments for digital services — a move that could shift how AI agents handle machine-to-machine transactions.
BlackRock has weighed in too, stating that it sees Bitcoin and stablecoins replacing banks for AI agents because regular banking tools like credit cards and wire transfers do not work for automated software. In BlackRock’s analysis, AI models chose Bitcoin 79.1% of the time to save long-term wealth, while traditional bank cash received under 9% support.
The Protocol Stack Behind Agent Payments
The agentic commerce ecosystem is converging on several open standards that GoBTC Pay and Agnic.AI both support.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is Google’s open protocol for authorizing AI agent payments with cryptographically signed mandates. Backed by 60+ partners including Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Coinbase, and Revolut, AP2 is designed as an extension of Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP). The core primitive is the Mandate — a cryptographically signed JSON credential that proves a specific human authorized a specific agent to make a specific kind of payment.
x402 is an open payment standard developed by Coinbase that lets AI agents and web services pay for things like API access, data, and digital services autonomously. It uses the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” response to handle payments — a service can request payment when an AI agent tries to access a paid API, dataset, or digital service.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) provides the context and tool-calling capabilities that allow agents to discover and interact with services. Agnic.AI runs a hosted MCP server that gives AI assistants the power to automatically discover and access x402-enabled APIs using the Agnic Wallet.
Agnic.AI itself builds the identity, authorization, and payment layer for AI agents: a wallet that gives an agent a verifiable identity and a cardholder-signed spending mandate, and completes checkout at merchants with no integration on their side. The company implements AP2, x402, and MCP, and runs the Agentic Commerce Pioneers hackathon series in Toronto.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is GoBTC Pay?
GoBTC Pay is a Layer-1 Bitcoin payment protocol developed by GoMining, a bitcoin mining company serving over 5.5 million users. It settles directly on the Bitcoin base layer, charges payers nothing, and levies a 0.2% merchant fee. The protocol uses a 2-of-3 multi-signature custody model and routes transactions through GoMining’s private mempool built on Stratum V2.
What was the Agnic.AI hackathon about?
Agentic Commerce Pioneers Edition II: The Shopping Agent Challenge was a remote build sprint hosted by Agnic.AI from September 10 to 20, 2026. The brief was to build an AI agent that can buy from almost any merchant. GoBTC Pay joined as a Diamond Sponsor with a dedicated track where teams shipped functional prototypes on the GoBTC Pay protocol.
Why do AI agents need Bitcoin instead of credit cards?
Credit cards assume a human is at checkout to approve each transaction. When an AI agent is buying, that assumption breaks. Agent commerce also creates a transaction type that barely exists today — one agent paying another for a service it just completed. These payments are small, frequent, cross-border, and have no cardholder or dispute desk. Traditional card networks also don’t support high-frequency microtransactions, while AI agent economies require per-second settlements and sub-cent payments.
How does GoBTC Pay keep transactions secure?
GoBTC Pay uses a 2-of-3 multi-signature setup shared between the user, GoMining, and a regulated third-party custodian, so the payer holds a key throughout the transaction. Transactions are routed through GoMining’s private mempool, built on the Stratum V2 mining protocol, which prioritizes GoBTC Pay transactions inside GoMining’s own pool.
What is AP2, and how does it relate to agent payments?
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is Google’s open protocol for authorizing AI agent payments with cryptographically signed mandates. It’s backed by over 60 organizations including Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Coinbase, and Revolut. AP2 works with both traditional card networks and crypto rails through the A2A x402 extension, which was co-developed with Coinbase and MetaMask.
The Road Ahead
The GoBTC Pay track at the Agnic.AI hackathon wasn’t a theoretical exercise. Teams shipped working prototypes — functional agents that can pay merchants and each other in Bitcoin. That matters because the agent economy is arriving faster than most payment infrastructure was designed to handle.
GoMining’s bet is that Bitcoin’s base layer, combined with a private mempool and miner-operated settlement, can provide the speed and cost profile that autonomous agents need. Whether that model scales to the $3.5 trillion agentic commerce market projected by 2031 remains to be seen. But the direction is clear: the payment rails for AI agents will look very different from the ones built for humans.
GoBTC Pay has opened its Gen1 SDK and API to third parties, inviting merchants, wallet providers, and ecosystem partners to build on the protocol. For developers exploring the agent payment space, the toolkit is now available at gobtcpay.com.
Disclosure: This article was produced based on publicly available press materials and independent research. GoBTC Pay and Agnic.AI are mentioned as the subjects of the original announcement.
