Key Takeaways:
LQWD Technologies Corp. (OTCQX: LQWDF) launched its AI Launchpad on April 27, an onboarding service for AI agents to transact on the Bitcoin Lightning Network that reduces a manual, capital-intensive process to a zero-cost automated one.
"Agents don't onboard to infrastructure the way humans do. They read a manifest, verify trust, and transact or they refuse," Shone Anstey, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of LQWD, said. "LQWD AI Launchpad is the first live Lightning onramp built for that workflow. The wallet software is open source; the network is the business."
The service works with LQWD’s open-source SaturnZap wallet, a full Lightning node, and publishes a machine-readable trust manifest at a public endpoint so autonomous agents can onboard without human intervention. While operators pay no fees to connect their agents, LQWD intends to monetize the system by collecting routing fees, paid in satoshis, as agent-to-agent micropayments cross its global network infrastructure. The company, which holds approximately 262 Bitcoin and has no outstanding debt, did not disclose revenue projections for the new service.
The launch positions LQWD in the nascent market for AI-driven financial plumbing, directly addressing the high-frequency, low-value transaction model of a machine-to-machine economy. The move comes as competition heats up to build the foundational payment layer for AI, with crypto exchange Coinbase recently introducing its own "Agentic Wallets" and the x402 payment standard gaining traction on low-cost chains like Solana. As the autonomous AI agent market—estimated by MarketsandMarkets at nearly $8 billion in 2025 and projected by Gartner to be embedded in 40% of enterprise applications by 2026—begins to scale, the infrastructure facilitating these automated payments on public blockchains is becoming a key competitive battleground.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
