Spiral asks for moonshot ideas to push Bitcoin payments forward

Spiral, the open-source Bitcoin initiative backed by Block, is asking the public for big ideas. Specifically, it wants ideas that could increase Bitcoin payment adoption within five years.

The invitation, posted on X, frames the question around a five-year window. Calling these ideas “moonshots” sets expectations. Spiral is not asking for minor tweaks to an existing wallet interface.

This is not a formal prize competition. There is no specific public contest attached to the call. Instead, the request sits alongside Spiral’s existing grants program, which already accepts detailed proposals from outside developers.

That grants program has some scale behind it. It has funded hundreds of contributors, drawn from more than a dozen countries.

The pieces already on the board

The most direct is the Bitcoin Merchant Community, or BMC. This campaign tries to persuade small businesses to accept Bitcoin. Its core pitch is financial: merchants could save nearly 3% on credit card fees.

The second front is less obvious and arguably more futuristic. Spiral has been working on Lightning Network payments inside Mesh LLM, a peer-to-peer network for AI inference.

Lightning is a payment layer built on top of Bitcoin, designed for fast and cheap transfers. AI inference is the work a model does when it answers a query, and it requires computing power, usually from GPUs. That integration started in October 2026. As of early October 2026, the payments layer was still under active development, following public discussions on October 3. There have been no confirmed production transactions so far.

A related development came in September 2026, when the x402 payment standard for AI agents added Lightning Network integration.

How Spiral got here

Spiral was set up in 2019 under Block, which at the time was still called Square. Its original mission was to speed up open-source Bitcoin development.

Since then, its scope has widened. Spiral now also works on open AI infrastructure, which explains the Mesh LLM project. Its grants program has followed the same path, inviting proposals that connect Bitcoin and open AI in new ways.

What to watch

The first confirmed Lightning transactions on Mesh LLM would show the machine-payments idea working outside a demo. Uptake of the Bitcoin Merchant Community among small businesses would test whether a fee-savings argument can actually change behavior. And any grants Spiral awards in response to this call could reveal which moonshots it thinks are worth launching.