The flow used four Bitrefill MCP server tools in sequence without human intervention
The report is from the CEO of the operating company; there is no independent verification at this time
Freddie New, CEO of B HODL Plc, a company that offers B2B advisory services on bitcoin, published a transaction report on his
The entire process was executed on April 3, 2026, It was done without human intervention and took less than 60 secondsafter the agent received an instruction in natural language.
The fact is especially relevant now given the growing launch of tools for autonomous agents. In recent weeks, Lightning Labs, Stripe and Amazon have intensified the development of infrastructure for machine-to-machine payments, making this operation a concrete test that the technology is already functional in practice.
According to New, the flow started with a message of text sent to the agent in a Telegram chat: “Buy me a £10 Amazon gift card.” From that moment on, the agent operated autonomously. In five seconds it searched for the product in the Bitrefill catalog, in three seconds it generated a Lightning invoice; in thirty seconds you paid the bill from your own Bitcoin node using Alby CLI v1.1.3; and in an additional five seconds he retrieved the redemption code with. The Total commission was 28 satoshis, equivalent to approximately USD 0.02.
The connection between the agent and Bitrefill was made through the Model Context Protocol (MCP)an open standard that allows AI agents to interact with external services using structured tools without human intervention.
The fact has not been corroborated by an independent source, as it was a demonstration reported by the company that operated the payment infrastructure. Until the publication of this note, neither Bitrefill nor OpenClaw have issued separate statements confirming the details of the transaction.
The demonstration does not occur in isolation. As Criptonoticias reported, in February 2026 Lightning Labs published a set of agent-oriented tools to facilitate programmatic payment flows over Lightning, including support for the L402 protocol. Stripe previewed machine-to-machine payments integrating the x402 protocol to charge agents in USDC,
According to New, what the transaction demonstrates is that the infrastructure for an agent to operate as an autonomous business participant —without humans in the loop and without a banking system—already exists and is functional. Independent verification of that claim is, for now, pending.
In this way, the demonstration marks a before and after: AI agents can now act as autonomous consumers within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The next step will be to scale these capabilities towards more complex and higher value purchases.