LQWD Technologies CEO and Chairman Shon Anstey said the company sees a potential business in using its Bitcoin (BTC) holdings to help route machine payments over Lightning, describing the idea as a developing opportunity rather than an existing AI service.
Anstey outlined the approach in a Nov. 9 interview published by Bitcoin Magazine. He called LQWD’s combination of BTC accumulation and Lightning operations “Treasury 2.0.”
Lightning enables transfers through payment channels. Operators commit BTC to those channels, and intermediary nodes may earn small fees as payments pass through the network. Anstey said LQWD’s expansion would depend on broader network reach and adoption, linking the company’s prospects to the use of Lightning by more participants.
He proposed that a robot could make a small BTC transfer to demonstrate control of its wallet. More broadly, Anstey said Lightning wallets could help authenticate AI agents and robots, while the network could carry payments for access to application programming interfaces and data. He said companies could also use scripts and execution rules to limit what AI agents are allowed to do.
Anstey said economic activity involving machines could eventually require more than one billion transactions per second. He described Lightning as early-stage and said meeting that kind of demand would require a network with many nodes and routes.
He also said LQWD supports using Lightning with stablecoins and other digital assets. Anstey argued that Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network offers more freedom from restrictions imposed by a controlling party, while noting that stablecoins can be frozen.
The proposal follows another discussion of machine payments over Lightning: EconoTimes previously covered Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino’s comments on hypothetical AI-agent payments.
