During the Bitcoin Conference held in Las Vegas on April 28, 2026, Lightspark introduced Grid Global Accounts, a new global account infrastructure on top of Bitcoin and Lightning, designed to enable payments executed by AI agents under user-defined rules and limits.
Grid Global Accounts is built on Lightspark Grid infrastructure, a money exchange platform that uses Bitcoin as a global settlement layer. The system allows applications to operate as global financial accounts without the need for their own banking license.
In the presentation of the infrastructure by David Marcus, CEO of Lightspark and former president of Paypal, HE included a demonstration of an artificial intelligence agent integrated into WhatsAppas an example of how the payment delegation system works.
During the conference, Marcus described a three-layer operating model for payments with AI agents: The agent identifies payment needs, the user defines policies and restrictions, and then the infrastructure executes transactions over Bitcoin and Lightning networks, a second layer network that allows fast and cheap transactions to be executed with BTC.
Use of AI as a payment manager
The main novelty of the system is the incorporation of the so-called AI agent bounded delegation, a mechanism that allows artificial intelligence agents to be assigned limited permissions to execute payments. These agents operate within an “operational pocket” with allocated funds, spending limits, authorized beneficiaries, and full auditing of transactions.
The infrastructure allows these permissions to be revoked at any time by the user, maintaining control over the scope of operations. Lightspark also manages KYC, regulatory compliance, and fraud prevention processes within its API.
The platform offers accounts in dollars or stablecoins, virtual and physical Visa cards, international payments in more than 65 countries and access to more than 14,000 banks. Additionally, it integrates native conversion to bitcoin and payment routing across multiple financial rails depending on the type of transaction.
In parallel to the development of infrastructures such as Grid Global Accounts, Other projects have emerged that explore the integration between artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies within the so-called agent economy. Initiatives such as L402 and x402 propose the use of automated payments in networks such as the Lightning Network or stablecoins using the HTTP protocol, while standards such as MCP, MPP or OWS seek to allow AI agents to interact directly with APIs, wallets and payment systems, as reported by CriptoNoticias.