Bitcoin Is the Payments Network of the Future for Generative AI and the Energy Transition

Bitcoin's Lightning Network can reach the scale of payments that AI, LLMs, and the agents and bots that will leverage them are expected to achieve.

Bitcoin has had a stellar year on its own, gaining broader adoption and greater influence.

The asset (BTC) is up over 125% in the last 12-months and over 33% year-to-date. BTC spot ETFs, introduced in January, have far exceeded the industry’s performance expectations to become the most successful ETF launch in US history. The group’s Day 1 net flow totalled $655 million on $4.66 billion of trading volume and over $50 billion in AUM has been accumulated across issuers to date. The most technologically sophisticated issuers have already adopted a proof of reserve standard - a capability native to bitcoin - to automatically, in real time, provide public verification of BTC holdings.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JANUARY 11: Samara Cohen, Chief Investment Officer of ETF and Index Investments ... [+] at Blackrock, (C) rings the opening bell as Bitcoin Spot ETF's are launched on the Nasdaq Exchange on January 11, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

Moreover, bitcoin’s payment network, Lightning Network, has seen strong, organic growth driven by the software’s utility, rather than the token incentives and cryptocurrency speculation that underly most of the engagement in non-bitcoin and non-stablecoin crypto ecosystems. Instead, Lightning Network transactions increased 1,212% over a 24-month period ending in late 2023 as use of the network increased including for cross-border and micropayments, both which Lightning makes more efficient.

From a 10,000 foot view, bitcoin has advanced as a store of value, matured and gained market share as a means of exchange, and increased dominance vs. the crypto market as classic crypto and stablecoin functions and activities have begun moving to bitcoin as they mature. This may be most evident with the flourishment of ZK rollups on bitcoin beginning in 2023.

But bitcoin doesn’t exist in a silo, it emerged in the late 2010s from a two+ prior decades of research and development and today bears significance to other nationally critical industries and large macro investment trends. In July, at the Bitcoin Conference 2024, I joined Cathie Wood, founder CEO and CIO of ARK Invest, to discuss bitcoin’s convergence with the macro investment trends of importance to large asset managers, specifically (I) generative AI and LLM technologies and infrastructure and (II) the energy transition to renewable generation.

Catherine Wood, chief executive officer of ARK Investment Management LLC, right, and Alyse Killeen, ... [+] founding partner of venture capital firm, Stillmark Management LLC, speak at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, US, on Friday, July 26, 2024. The conference is an annual event organized by BTC Media LLC for fans of the original cryptocurrency. Photographer: Liam Kennedy/Bloomberg

Google Chrome 3-Week Update Deadline—New Warning To Change Your Browser

Today’s New Moon Sets Up A ‘Supermoon Eclipse’ And A ‘Ring Of Fire’

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Tuesday, September 3

First, to reach and capture the full potential in generative AI technologies, investors must consider the payments infrastructure that is fit to serve a field of new capabilities that will likely come to include, for example, per-API call monetization, reliance on multiple models to achieve a solution, AI models that reference (and need to make payment to) other models or external data pools, AI-supported agents that interact and/or transact with an audience (e.g. to issue rewards or incentives) or on behalf of an individual or enterprise (e.g. to filter spam), or more simply, paywalled content and data materials. A mature AI and LLM ecosystem will require cost efficient micropayments on a highly scalable payments architecture, which falls outside of the strengths of traditional financial systems and beyond the system constraints of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies and their payment focused L2s (“layer twos”).

Uniquely, with bitcoin’s Lightning Network, real time payments are able to match the flow of value in a system. Lightning payments settle instantly and nearly for free, unlocking the potential for efficient microtransactions and opening global access to software and data, including AI models, data pools, and agents or bots.

Within the bitcoin and crypto industries, only bitcoin’s Lightning Network can reach the scale of payments that AI, LLMs, and the agents and bots that will leverage them are expected to achieve. This is because the Lightning Network is a payments channel network and, as such, Lightning payments do not require a global state of network transactions to assure honest transactions. Consequently, Lightning payments do not require the scarce and costly block space of the underlying blockchain outside of specific, anomalous, circumstances. Other blockchain scaling solutions, including