AI Agent-Driven Payment Infrastructure: A New Wave of Innovation in the Encryption Industry

Introduction

For nearly a century, economic activity has always been based on humans as the basic unit. However, the rise of AI technology is reshaping this pattern, transforming machines from passive tools into “active economic entities” — AI Agents.

In addition, during the Spring Festival of 2025, USDT announced its integration into the BTC ecosystem, covering its base layer and the Lightning Network. Behind these trends, a transformation is brewing: payment infrastructure driven by AI agents is pushing the encryption industry into a new wave of innovation. From the consensus layer of BTC to the execution layer of smart contracts, and now to the AI-driven application layer, the encryption industry is likely to welcome a paradigm innovation of AI + Pay Fi + BTC Infra, forcing Web2 to self-reform towards Web3— the future of mass adoption is gradually becoming a reality.

1. Stablecoins: The Cornerstone of a New Era in Global Payments - A Decade of Evolution from Cross-Border Revolution to Mainstream Currency

The programmability, cross-border practicality, and increasingly clear regulatory framework of stablecoins are expected to make them the standard settlement currency for global payments. With the advancement of cryptocurrency-friendly policies, the application scenarios for stablecoins will gradually expand, and we can look forward to a bright 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 than traditional systems. Payment cards related to encryption will simplify consumption, building a bridge between on-chain wealth and real-world transactions.

Medium term (3-7 years): Enterprises will increasingly adopt stablecoin payments due to the low costs, instant settlement, and programmability of stablecoins. Companies will be able to seamlessly convert between encryption and fiat currencies, providing customers with dual-track payment options.

Long-term (7 years and above): Stablecoins will become mainstream fiat currencies, widely accepted for payments and even tax payments, fundamentally disrupting traditional financial infrastructure.

In addition to payment convenience, stablecoins also play a positive role in other areas: they provide entrepreneurs with easier access to develop new payment products without intermediaries, minimum balances, or proprietary SDKs. It is estimated that if medium and large enterprises use stablecoin solutions, profits could increase by 2%. Some countries have already attempted to use stablecoins for international trade to bypass traditional settlement systems. An increasing number of cases indicate that stablecoins are gradually approaching their optimal market positioning. This is not surprising – they are undoubtedly the most economical and fastest global payment method using USD for settlement.

2. Next Level: AI Agents Become a New User Experience Layer for Future Apps

Currently, we no longer rely solely on AI to perform single tasks, but have entered the “era of AI agents becoming independent market participants”. This change involves AI-driven financial transactions, intelligent supply chain management, and generative AI providing services for content creators, developers, and enterprises. AI agents can even autonomously negotiate, trade, settle, and optimize their own resource utilization.

At the end of last year, we saw AI Agents redefine DApp application scenarios, such as AI Agents that can autonomously promote tokens. Subsequently, AI Agents emerged that can independently use tokens for trading, generate content, and even manage encryption wallets and assets. This evolutionary capability has given rise to new narratives in the encryption field, such as Virtual Protocol—a protocol similar to Pump.fun, but the “Pump” targets are various AI Agents.

The evolving capabilities of AI Agents, combined with on-demand platforms, open up trillion-dollar market opportunities for the AI Agent + Crypto concept. AI is becoming an active participant in the on-chain ecosystem, driving blockchain applications from tool-based to ecosystem-based development.

In the future, AI will become the user experience layer of blockchain technology, connecting the application layer and the infrastructure. For example, AI can proactively recommend and execute on-chain DeFi operations based on user intentions and preferences, combined with real-time information. Users do not need to understand the underlying technical details. Expanding into daily life, an AI personal finance assistant can autonomously manage taxes, insurance, and rental income and expenses, dynamically optimizing investment portfolios and automatically executing trades based on market changes.

While granting AI economic autonomy, security issues cannot be overlooked. Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) have become a key infrastructure, ensuring that AI Agent behaviors follow preset logic and are not subject to external manipulation by isolating the computing environment. AI Agents running in TEE can earn income through content creation while also ensuring absolute control over asset keys. AI can also operate Depin nodes or verify data, becoming the core executor of distributed systems.

The workflows and application scenarios of these AI Agents are sketching out a brand new “machine economy” landscape: from game players to Depin managers, from content creation to financial strategies, AI Agents will become the core driving force of the on-chain ecosystem.

3. The Dilemma of Existing Payment Systems: The Invisible Shackles of the AI Economy

In the future, AI Agents will partially replace humans, becoming independent participants in the market and forming an important force. However, this machine economic revolution faces challenges, one of the core issues being “payment.” The realization of the AI revolution requires an efficient, secure, and decentralized payment network built on blockchain technology to provide AI Agents with seamless economic interaction capabilities.

3.1 Economic Imbalance of Micropayments

Imagine an AI agent operating a high-frequency trading strategy, completing 1,000 trades per second, with each trade amounting to only 0.0001 USD. Using traditional payment networks, each transaction incurs a minimum fee of 0.30 USD, which means that for every 0.0001 USD traded, the AI agent would have to pay a fee 3,000 times greater. This cost structure makes it impossible for the AI economy to operate on existing payment systems.

3.2 The fatal flaw of settlement speed

For AI agents, trading is a continuous flow process. However, the settlement methods of traditional payment networks are extremely lagging:

• Credit card payment: Usually takes 1-3 days to complete settlement.
• International transfer: may take 2-5 days.
• Cryptocurrency payment (such as Bitcoin main chain transactions): on average takes 10 minutes or even longer.

The AI economy requires millisecond-level settlement, and the existing payment systems are clearly unable to meet this need.

3.3 Limitations of Centralized Architecture

AI agents are essentially global and not restricted by geographical boundaries. However, traditional payment systems are deeply entangled in issues such as bank accounts, fiat currency compliance, and regional payment regulations.

• Bank account dependency: Most payment systems require parties to have a bank account, and AI agents cannot open accounts like humans.
• Centralized control: Existing payment systems rely on a few financial institutions for approval, and AI agent transactions may be rejected at any time due to regulatory or compliance issues.
• International payment barriers: AI agents in cross-border transactions face 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 imposed limitations and will not be able to truly unleash its potential.

The Five Core Demands of the 3.4 AI Economic Payment System

Considering the possible operational characteristics and use cases of AI Agents, the future payment system for AI services must possess the following five core capabilities:

• Micro-payment capability: AI agent trading often involves very small amounts, and it is essential to ensure that transaction fees are extremely low, even approaching zero.
• Millisecond-level transaction settlement: AI trading occurs within a sub-second time scale, 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 to avoid reliance on bank accounts.
• Intelligent Payment Protocol: The payment system must be able to interact seamlessly with AI agents, supporting features such as automated settlement, smart trading routing, and liquidity optimization.

4. The Hope and Limitations of Blockchain Payments

The rise of blockchain technology has brought hope to the AI economy. The decentralization, smart contracts, and permissionless transactions of blockchain make it an alternative to traditional payment systems. However, mainstream blockchain still faces the following issues:

High cost of 4.1 ETH network payment

ETH is the primary infrastructure for DeFi, but high transaction costs make it difficult for the AI economy to adopt. During network congestion, a simple USDT transaction may require $10-50 in Gas fees, with limited transaction throughput and slow processing speeds, making it hard to support the high-frequency trading needs of AI agents.

4.2 The speed and centralization issues of other high-performance public chains

The encryption ecosystem has seen the emergence of many high-performance public chains that offer faster transaction processing capabilities, but they are relatively centralized, posing security risks. Some high-performance public chains have experienced multiple outages, affecting transaction stability. Most public chains rely on a small number of validation nodes, which may impact the decentralized nature of the payment system.

scalability bottleneck of 4.3 BTC mainnet

BTC, as the world’s most secure and decentralized blockchain, has unmatched security, but its payment capabilities are limited. The transaction throughput of the BTC mainnet is extremely low (only 7 transactions per second), and when faced with high transaction volumes, gas fees soar, leading to significant fluctuations in transaction costs, making it unsuitable for AI agents for small payments.

4.4 Lightning Network - A New Stage for Stablecoin Payments

The Lightning Network, as the first second-layer scaling solution for BTC, relies on the security of the BTC network (over 57,000 nodes and the PoW mechanism) to achieve instant, low-cost, and infinitely scalable transaction capabilities through bidirectional payment channels. This technological approach is highly suited for micro, high-frequency payment scenarios and aligns with the ideal of purist encryption enthusiasts — all transactions are conducted based on the BTC network. Currently, the Lightning Network has over 15,000 nodes and over 50,000 channels, demonstrating its strong ecological potential.

However, the Lightning Network is not perfect. Before the emergence of the Taproot Assets protocol, it only supported BTC as a payment currency, and the application scenarios were limited. BTC has become “digital gold”, and most people are reluctant to spend their held BTC easily. At this time, the importance of stablecoins is highlighted: history shows that only currencies with stable value can be widely accepted and used in daily payment scenarios.

USDT, as the dominant stablecoin in the encryption world, has a total issuance of over $140 billion, which is more than twice that of USDC. The integration of USDT into the Lightning Network is significant, marking a recognition of the security and usability of public chains. The real on-chain users and transaction fee income brought by USDT are the resources that every public chain dreams of. This also indicates that after years of development, the era where the Lightning Network can truly showcase its potential has arrived.

5. Everything is ready, just waiting for the favorable wind.

The explosive growth of AI agents is giving rise to a trillion-dollar machine economy landscape, but traditional payment networks (high cost, low speed) and existing blockchain solutions struggle to meet its demands. The integration of USDT into the Lightning Network provides a key piece of the puzzle for the industry—an almost zero-cost, censorship-resistant payment channel, combined with stablecoin liquidity, perfectly suited for AI agent micropayments and real-time transaction scenarios.

AISA has emerged in response to the situation, not only as a simple stacking of technology stacks but also as a “financial operating system” tailored for the AI economy, allowing the AI economy to break free from the shackles of payment and move towards a future of autonomous interaction. In the future AI economy, payment equals efficiency, and transaction equals intelligence.

6. AISA: The Ultimate Fusion of Lightning Network, Stablecoins, and AI Agents - Restructuring the Payment Foundation for the AI Economy

6.1 AISA’s four-layer technical architecture

The AISA architecture is divided into four core layers that work together to enable AI agents to make payments freely and efficiently.

a. Settlement Layer

• Underlying Network: BTC Network (L1) + Lightning Network (L2)
• Core advantages:
  • Security: Based on the Bitcoin PoW mechanism and decentralized network (over 57,000 global nodes)
  • Efficiency: Millisecond-level transaction confirmation, near-zero transaction fees, addressing the pain points of AI high-frequency micropayments.

b. Payment Layer

• Multi-chain support: Compatible with public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, etc., allowing the AI agent to freely choose the optimal chain.
• Stablecoin Integration: AISA issues its own aiUSD (native stablecoin) and circulates USDT and USDC as payment currencies on the Lightning Network through the Taproot Assets protocol.

c. Smart Payment Layer (Programmable Layer)

• AI Native Protocol (AIP): Empowering AI agents with autonomous decision-making capabilities
• Dynamic routing: Real-time analysis of transaction fees and network congestion, automatically switching payment paths.
• Automated micropayments: according to