Spiral seeks bold proposals to expand Bitcoin payment use

what happened

Crypto Briefing reports that Spiral, the open-source Bitcoin group funded by Block, is inviting the public to submit large-scale concepts. The target is ideas able to lift the use of Bitcoin for payments over a five-year horizon. The call, published on X, describes these as moonshots, signaling that minor wallet tweaks will not do. It is not a formal competition with prizes; it runs alongside Spiral's grants program, which already backs outside developers and has supported hundreds of contributors from more than a dozen countries.

The most direct effort is the Bitcoin Merchant Community, known as BMC, which urges small shops to accept bitcoin. Its main argument is financial: merchants could save close to 3% on credit card fees. A second track is more speculative. Spiral is building Lightning Network payments into Mesh LLM, a peer-to-peer network for AI inference, where a model uses GPU computing power to answer queries. The work began in October 2026, but as of early October the payment layer was still in active development and no production transactions have been confirmed. In September 2026, the x402 payment standard for AI agents also added Lightning support.

Spiral was founded in 2019 under Block, then named Square, to speed up open-source Bitcoin development. Its remit has since grown to include open AI infrastructure, which explains the Mesh LLM project.

why it matters

For markets, this is an early-stage signal rather than a price event. Three markers matter: the first confirmed Lightning transactions on Mesh LLM, which would show machine payments working beyond a demo; uptake of BMC among small merchants, which would test whether fee savings change behavior; and any grants awarded under this call, which would reveal which ideas Spiral considers worth launching.

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