Spiral: A Bitcoin Newsletter, Now in Audio

Spiral is expanding beyond bitcoin into open-source AI by bringing the core goose developers from Block onto the team. Our first area of focus will be evolving goose into the goose Development Kit (GDK), an SDK that lets developers build their own agentic AI applications rather than relying on a single client. Learn more at spiral.xyz This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this wit...

Everything is moving at AI speed now. As recently as a few months ago, the question “how will my agent pay for things?” didn’t have a great answer. Humans had to intervene frequently to help agents log in to services and obtain API keys to bypass credit card payment gates, blunting much of the utility of persistent agents. Today, there are dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of wallets and tools that le...

Loupe is a new open-source security scanning tool from Spiral and Block designed to help bitcoin developers find vulnerabilities in open-source code. The episode explores how Loupe works, why AI-powered security tooling matters for the future of bitcoin, and the challenges of balancing high-signal vulnerability detection with the growing flood of AI-generated noise in open source. Read the full ar...

This Spiral report explores how open-source builders are using AI today, based on survey data and interviews with Spiral grantees and team members. Written by Austin Krauss, it argues that the most important skill is not mastering any one tool, but developing metacognition: the ability to reflect on, adapt, and redesign your workflow as AI evolves. The report identifies four emerging builder arche...

AI agents are getting powerful, but they still can’t reliably pay for things because the internet’s payment stack is built to stop bots. Big players like Visa, Stripe/OpenAI, Google, and Coinbase are racing to define “agentic payments,” but the standards they push are likely to be permissioned, incomplete, or create lock-in around a small set of approved rails. If open-source agents want to stay c...

The Bitcoin Merchant Community is an effort to accelerate bitcoin payment adoption by merchants. The goal is twofold: 1) help merchants understand that they can eliminate 3% credit card fees by accepting bitcoin, and 2) empower bitcoiners to locally spread that message to merchants in a fun and memorable way. It’s been one month since we launched the Bitcoin Merchant Community and we’re off to a s...

The existing bitcoin address ecosystem looks about as intimidating to newcomers as it could. They look like 1Aqv9KxZc2y7M8b for a reason, sure, but they’re far from necessary. Human Bitcoin Addresses (BIP 353) are a worthy replacement and a huge UX unlock for bitcoin. Read the full article here: https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/making-bitcoin-speak-human Spiral has supported FOSS bitcoin since 201...

Our thesis is pretty simple: we can only make the case that bitcoin is money if people can spend it. Unfortunately, for most of bitcoin’s existence, there just haven’t been many places to spend it. This is why we’re spearheading a peer-to-peer community exclusively for merchants, one that is bitcoin service-agnostic, to promote the idea of bitcoin as everyday money: https://www.bitcoinmerchantcomm...

Spiral Product Managers, Mat Balez and Conor Okus, outline a few long-term plans to grow the influence and impact of the Bitcoin Design Community. Read the full article on Spiral’s Substack: spiralbtc.substack.com FOLLOW: Mat Balez: https://x.com/matbalez Conor Okus: https://x.com/ConorOkus Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subsc...

This post is written by Spiral grantee, Matt Morehouse , who is working on improving Lightning’s security and stability. Read the written version on our Substack: spiralbtc.substack.com FOLLOW: Matt Morehouse: https://morehouse.github.io/ Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralx...

We’re working on stuff. What stuff? This stuff. It’s a lot more stuff than we would like. Spiral: https://x.com/spiralbtc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit spiralxyz.substack.com

Spiral PM Mat Balez makes the case for using ₿ to represent all bitcoin quantities. He explores how today’s emphasis on “sats” could eventually edge the word “bitcoin” out of everyday payments entirely. Along the way, he unpacks product design, brand clarity, and why the humble ₿ might be key to onboarding the next billion users. FOLLOW: Mat Balez: https://x.com/matbalez, Spiral: https://x.com/spi...