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May 5, 2025

Introducing the Agent Payments API

We built the easiest way for AI agents to send and receive money. Open beta is now available globally for all developers.

"The AIs are coming. The AIs don't get bank accounts, they don't get credit cards. The AIs, the artificial intelligence economy, will be built on digital capital, digital property. It will be a hundred trillion dollar economy. It will be built on bitcoin." --Michael Saylor

Is 2025 the "Year of Agents"?

Not yet — not if agents can't easily send and receive money!

There has been no easy way to do this until now.

Keep it simple, stupid

Developers and their coding agents should not need to crawl through protocol specifications & X flame-wars to add payments to their apps and agents.

Adding payments should be as simple as calling a few simple HTTP endpoints.

OpenAgents API

So that's what we built.

All you need to do is grab a free API key, paste our OpenAPI doc into an LLM and ask it to connect payments, and you're good to go.

See the docs.

Coming soon

  • Bitcoin revenue sharing
  • Stablecoins including Tether (via Taproot Assets)
  • Self-custodial web wallet for users (via Breez)
  • Select LRC-20 tokens (via Spark)
  • Chaumian ecash (via Cashu)
  • L402 support

AI Video Summaries

Summary

This presentation introduces the OpenAgents API at the Rusty Vibe Coding AI Hackathon, positioned as a "bleeding edge" experimental tool for enabling AI agents to transact money easily via Bitcoin and Lightning. Built on the recently released Spark SDK by Lightspark, the API aims to simplify agent payments down to single API calls. Key features include creating agents, managing agent wallets, generating/paying Lightning invoices, and enabling instant, fee-free agent-to-agent payments using Spark addresses without liquidity concerns. The speaker demos the API, including signup, key generation, agent/wallet creation, funding via Lightning, and a successful Spark transfer between agents. While highlighting its potential, the speaker emphasizes the API's beta status ("#reckless"), encourages hackathon participation (with a shared prize purse), and outlines future plans to support more protocols like stablecoins (Tether via Taproot Assets), Chaumian Ecash, and L402, ultimately aiming to provide a comprehensive, easy-to-use payment layer for the emerging AI agent economy.

Key Points & Timeline

  • [0:09] Introduction: Open Agents API announced at Rusty Vibe Hackathon.
  • [0:15] Positioning: Contrasted with stable Zaprite API; Open Agents API is "bleeding edge," expect bugs.
  • [0:33] Availability: Docs at openagents.com; same prize purse as Zaprite track.
  • [0:43] Core Goal: Make transacting money to/from agents as easy as a single API call.
  • [0:53] Underlying Tech: Built on Lightspark's new Spark SDK (described as a layer 2/state chain).
  • [1:11] Spark Feature Highlight: Instant, fee-free agent-to-agent payments within the Spark ecosystem without liquidity needs.
  • [1:20] Exit Options: Agents can still exit to standard Lightning and Bitcoin.
  • [2:00] Vision: Enabling agents as economic actors transacting with Bitcoin.
  • [2:25] API vs SDK: Open Agents API provides HTTP access, usable from any backend (e.g., Rust), while Spark SDK is initially Node.js focused.
  • [2:57] Security Warning: Do not expose API keys on the client-side.
  • [3:17] API Docs Overview: Agent creation (basic), Wallet management (create, balance check), Payments (Lightning invoice create/pay, Spark send).
  • [5:00] Hackathon Judging Hint: Looking for cool uses, especially agent-to-agent commerce or interaction with external Lightning services.
  • [6:07] OpenAPI Spec: Available at openagents.com/openapi for easy integration.
  • [7:28] Authentication: Free sign-up (email/password), generate Bearer API token.
  • [8:38] Live Demo Start: Sign up, generate API key.
  • [11:25] Demo: Create Agent 1.
  • [12:04] Demo: Create Wallet for Agent 1 (initial temporary connection issue resolved).
  • [16:07] Demo: Create Agent 2 and its Wallet.
  • [17:00] Demo: Create Lightning Invoice for Agent 1 (8 sats).
  • [17:42] Demo: Invoice funded externally.
  • [18:54] Demo: Check balance of Agent 1 (shows 8 sats).
  • [19:42] Demo: Check balance of Agent 2 (shows 0 sats).
  • [19:53] Demo: Initiate Spark payment of 5 sats from Agent 1 to Agent 2.
  • [20:36] Demo: Spark payment successful.
  • [20:54] Demo: Check balances again (Agent 1: 3 sats, Agent 2: 5 sats), confirming fee-free transfer.
  • [21:30] Recap: Basic payment functionality demonstrated.
  • [24:36] Future Vision: Adding support for Stablecoins (Tether/Taproot Assets), self-custodial web wallet (Breez), LRC-20s, Chaumian ecash (Cashu), L402.
  • [25:51] Call for Feedback: Report bugs and provide input.

Quotes

[0:15] This is uh way less mature and stable than the Zaprite API. So if you're like a you want something stable and mature and production ready Zapright's the way to go. So if you want something bleeding edge and like you'll find some bugs that are hilarious but you'll build cool [stuff]... yeah use the open agents API.

[0:43] The big idea here is we want to let you transact money to and from agents as easy as making a single API call.

[1:11] You can send agent to agent instantly with no fees whatsoever and not need to worry about channel liquidity.

[1:43] The AI are coming. The AIs don't get bank accounts. They don't get credit cards... The artificial intelligence economy will be built on digital capital, digital property... It will be built on Bitcoin. Obviously this is going to require agents to be able to be economic actors and transact with Bitcoin. There has not really been an easy way to do this I argue until now.

[14:37] If you didn't see this beta warning let's zoom it in. The open agents API is currently in beta. Do not use it with live funds that you aren't willing to use... back in the early days of Lightning we called it #reckless. Like it's production but you'll probably lose your stuff. So uh #reckless over on top of this.

[21:35] The main objective here is like make it as easy for someone to add lightning payments to any agent... There's like an a series of API endpoints that can interact easily with Lightning that you don't have to care about liquidity or channels or any of that kind of thing.

[25:38] Basically any kind of Bitcoin based protocol agent should be able to speak it... we would just want to make it easy for developers to be able to like have one API call and then just have all this accessible to them.