Bitcoin is holding $81K through an equity selloff, a rising 10-year and unrest in Europe, and Blockstream CMO Peter Bain calls that “a really, really strong signal.” He joins Grace Remington and Sean Hagan to explain why the technology build-out comes before the price, what Blockstream’s new Lugano hub and consulting division mean for institutional adoption, and why Switzerland’s clear rules and banking depth make it the right launch market. He also gives the first update on the Liquid Network incident: the swap service is back and users can move Bitcoin to the main chain.
Chapters: 0:00 Bitcoin Holding $81K Through the Equity Selloff Is a “Strong Signal” 0:44 Build-Out Before Price: Adoption, Stablecoins and Tokenized Equities 1:26 Blockstream’s Lugano Hub and New Consulting Division for Institutions 2:10 Why Treasury Companies Are Mostly American and Why Switzerland Is Next 3:19 Quantum Is Decades Away: Bitcoin’s Real Weak Spots 4:22 The PHP Exploit and Why Everyone Must Rethink How Software Ships 5:07 Making Bitcoin Quantum Resistant: Blockstream Research and Signature Schemes 6:18 How Consensus Reaches a Quantum Upgrade and the Bitcoin Security Consortium 7:33 Liquid Network Hack Update: Swap Service Restored, Network Back Online 8:27 Outlook Through 2027: “Poised for a Big Bull Run”
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
Square Tech to explore AI agent-powered payment solutions as part of its Digital Solutions (DS) business
Initial focus on integrating GOAT Network’s technology into a stablecoin payment program for foreign tourists, currently under development with Lordsystem
Proposed safeguards include verifiable on-chain identity, spending limits, and user authorization, with a phased rollout subject to Korean legal and regulatory review
SEOUL, October 22, 2026 – Square Tech (KOSDAQ: 148250) announced today that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with GOAT Network, the Bitcoin-secured infrastructure for agentic commerce, to explore AI agent-powered stablecoin payment services in South Korea as part of its Digital Solutions business. DAC Labs, the core infrastructure developer behind GOAT Network, has also joined the agreement to provide technical support.
As an initial priority, the companies will explore integrating GOAT Network’s AI agent payment technology into a stablecoin payment program for foreign tourists that Square Tech is currently developing with Lordsystem, a South Korean mobile identity verification company. The program aims to enable foreign visitors to verify their identities using mobile passports and make payments at participating merchants in South Korea using US dollar-denominated stablecoins. The partners will also evaluate potential expansion into additional services, including digital gift card and voucher purchases, subject to applicable legal and regulatory reviews.
Under the agreement, Square Tech will lead domestic business development, merchant partnerships, and regulatory engagement. GOAT Network will provide its AI agent payment technology and network infrastructure, while DAC Labs will support technical integration, security reviews, and network operations.
The collaboration comes as South Korea continues to develop its regulatory frameworks for artificial intelligence and digital assets. The country’s AI Basic Act, formally known as the Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and Establishment of a Foundation for Trust, came into effect in January 2026. Meanwhile, discussions are underway in the National Assembly on the proposed Digital Asset Basic Act, which seeks to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets, including Korean won-denominated stablecoins.
At Korea Blockchain Week 2026 in Seoul, GOAT Network demonstrated these capabilities through an interactive agent-powered purchasing experience, highlighting early consumer interest in AI-driven commerce. The collaboration with Square Tech represents a further step toward bringing these capabilities into real-world payment applications.
The proposed solution will incorporate technical safeguards designed to ensure trust, security, and transparency when AI agents execute payments on behalf of users. Each AI agent will be assigned a verifiable on-chain identity based on the ERC-8004 standard. Spending limits, user authorization mechanisms, and comprehensive transaction records will also be implemented to enable transparent monitoring of AI agent payment activities.
In the initial phase, the companies plan to support US dollar-denominated stablecoins through arrangements that meet applicable licensing and regulatory requirements. They also intend to establish the technical foundation for potential support of Korean won-denominated stablecoins as South Korea’s digital asset regulatory framework evolves.
Kangho Kim, CEO of Square Tech, said: “South Korea is rapidly establishing the regulatory foundations for AI and digital assets. The next important step is translating these developments into practical services that consumers and merchants can use. Through this collaboration, Square Tech aims to integrate global technologies into South Korea’s domestic payment environment and regulatory framework, while building a new payment ecosystem that brings AI and stablecoins into everyday transactions.”
Kevin Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of GOAT Network, said: “The next evolution of AI agents goes beyond understanding user requests to making purchases on their behalf. For agentic commerce to scale, businesses need to make their products and services accessible to AI agents, while consumers need assurance that purchases are authorized, spending stays within defined limits, and payments are secure. Through our collaboration with Square Tech, we aim to explore how these capabilities can support real-world commerce in South Korea.”
The companies intend to comply with all applicable South Korean laws and regulations, including the Electronic Financial Transactions Act, the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, and the Act on Reporting and Use of Certain Financial Transaction Information. Where necessary, they will work with appropriately licensed service providers to deliver the proposed services. Consumer-facing features will be introduced in phases, subject to legal and regulatory review.
About Square Tech
Square Tech was founded in 2002 and is based in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. The company develops and produces LTCC (Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic) components and substrates used in the telecommunications, defense, and automotive industries, and has been listed on KOSDAQ since 2016. Through its Digital Solutions business, Square Tech is expanding into digital asset payments. The company is developing a stablecoin payment program for foreign tourists with Lordsystem, a South Korean mobile identity verification company, and is pursuing cooperation with Anchorage Digital, a US-based institutional digital asset platform, on institutional digital asset infrastructure.
About GOAT Network
GOAT Network is Bitcoin-secured infrastructure for agentic commerce, connecting businesses, consumers, developers, and AI agents. Its core product, GOAT Flow, makes products and services discoverable, understandable, and purchasable by AI agents, while GOAT AgentKit provides developers with tools to build agent-native applications. GOAT Network’s core infrastructure is developed by DAC Labs, a research and engineering company specializing in blockchain infrastructure, zero-knowledge technology, and AI agent systems.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored press release. Readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence before acting on any information presented in this article.
The Liquid Network on Tuesday said that things were up and running again, over one month after hackers stole 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million at the time, from the network’s federation wallet before returning most of it in a “white hat” operation.
Writing in a blog post, the Liquid Network said that it was entering “the final stages of recovery with enhanced security.”
Hackers in September stole 4,000 bitcoins from the federation wallet that backs the Blockstream sidechain. Blockstream was able to negotiate to get back most of the funds.
“The final phase of restoration involves reestablishing the network’s full 1:1 bitcoin backing, followed by the controlled reactivation of Federation peg-outs for authorized PAK key holders,” the Liquid blog post read.
“The Federation, Blockstream, and independent security experts have made substantial progress toward this objective, with the necessary technical infrastructure and safeguards now in place.”
The post added that it had introduced phased swaps again. Blockstream CEO Adam Back wrote on X on Tuesday that swaps were working again.
Liquid is a layer-2 created by Blockstream that allows users to quickly move assets backed 1:1 with bitcoin. People can swap stablecoins for bitcoin and bitcoin on the Lightning Network on apps that support the Liquid Network.
Hackers were able to get 4,000 bitcoins by exploiting an inflation bug on the Liquid sidechain to create over 4,000 LBTC — a token supposedly backed by bitcoin — that did not exist before and cash them out for real on-chain BTC.
The hackers claimed to be white hat hackers who then had an exchange with Blockstream via messages written into Bitcoin blocks. Though critics argue they were not so ‘white’ since they kept 15% of the stolen funds, worth millions.
In one message, the hackers slammed Blockstream as “delusional, greedy, and arrogant,” and threatened to reveal all of Blockstream’s encrypted messages in the exchange unless the company paid the hackers 10% of the bitcoins as an official bounty.
“You SHALL pay 10% using your own money as bug bounty or you will cause all your holders a 15% loss for your irresponsibility and stinginess,” the message read.
The hackers are still holding onto around 600 bitcoins — or 15% of the total funds — worth close to $50 million at today’s prices as per the latest public knowledge.
It is not clear if Blockstream reached a settlement with the hackers in private.
Whether or not quantum computers will break Bitcoin one day is a hot topic.
But what about second-layer solutions like Lightning?
Well, researchers from East Texas A&M University, North American University, Florida Gulf Coast University, and Florida Institute of Technology have been working on that.
JUST IN: East Texas A&M University students announce they've built the first post-quantum security solution for the Bitcoin Lightning Network pic.twitter.com/GJYL2a9g2G
In an announcement Tuesday, the team of researchers said that they built what they describe as the first full post-quantum security design for the Lightning Network.
As first uncovered in a research paper in September, the team said they added post-quantum cryptography to Lightning’s communications, payment requests and related systems, implemented in Rust-Lightning.
It works like this: The solution layers new quantum-resistant cryptography on top of Lightning’s existing cryptography rather than replacing it. It uses ML-DSA digital signatures and ML-KEM key exchange, post-quantum algorithms standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, alongside the classical methods Lightning already relies on.
In this hybrid design, an attacker would have to break both the new and the old cryptography to compromise a connection or forge a payment request.
According to the team led by Dr. Ahmet Kurt, an assistant professor in East Texas A&M’s Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, it took about three to four months and roughly 11,000 lines of code — and it’s a complete working implementation, not just a small demo.
Lightning lets users make fast, cheap Bitcoin payments through a network of off-chain channels instead of recording each one on the blockchain.
Its cryptography could eventually be broken by powerful quantum computers, and that risk exists even if Bitcoin itself gets upgraded, because Lightning has its own communication and payment systems, the team said.
They added that their work demonstrates that Lightning’s off-chain systems can begin preparing for the quantum era independently while others focus on solutions for the mainnet.
Quantum researchers have warned that a time will come when Bitcoin’s software — which underpins the biggest and strongest computer network in the world — will need to be upgraded to deal with quantum computing.
While some crypto VC firms have urged action, top developers in the space have argued that many of today’s quantum computers have limited capabilities.
Still, they have noted that their development could arrive unexpectedly — just like advances with artificial intelligence — and have started developing some solutions, including top Bitcoin infrastructure firm, Blockstream.
Bitcoin software company Breez said demand for its developer tools has surged since AI coding agents went mainstream, with partnership inquiries rising roughly 14-fold as developers, and increasingly the agents they deploy, look to add bitcoin payments to their apps.
In a company blog post, it tied the jump directly to Anthropic’s Claude Code, which launched as a research preview in February 2025 and became generally available three months later.
Before 2025, Breez said, most prospective partners fell into three camps: committed bitcoin enthusiasts, crypto developers, and fintech firms that treat bitcoin as an asset class.
Since Claude Code arrived, the company said, it has heard from many developers with little or no bitcoin experience. Requests have come from fitness apps, messaging apps that want users to send each other money, an eSIM service for travelers, and the team behind a mushroom-identification app.
Breez said many of these developers pick bitcoin for speed. Setting up traditional payment acceptance, including a bank account and cross-border transfers, can take weeks or months, while the company says its SDK can be running within minutes.
Breez said a growing share of inquiries now come from software, not people. The company said it regularly fields requests from coding agents writing on behalf of the companies that deploy them.
The company argues agents favor bitcoin because it is permissionless. An agent can build an app and set up payments for users worldwide without opening a bank account, passing onboarding checks or signing forms.
“Bitcoin is agnostic about whether the code of its current owner and user is composed of DNA base pairs or weights in a neural net,” Breez wrote.
That same absence of gatekeeping has long drawn scrutiny from financial regulators, who require traditional payment providers to verify customers.
Breez said its newest SDK implementation, built on the Bitcoin scaling protocol Spark, handled the added volume without problems.
The company framed the shift as an update to investor Marc Andreessen’s 2011 essay arguing that software is eating the world, saying AI is now eating software. It compared Bitcoin’s role to background infrastructure like electrical sockets and subsea cables.
Crypto exchange WhiteBIT announced on Thursday that the platform has integrated the network to help users quickly and efficiently move funds.
Powered by BTC infrastructure provider Voltage, the Swiss exchange said that bitcoin withdrawals and deposits can be made over the network. A number of major exchanges — including Coinbase and Kraken — have integrated the second-layer solution in recent years.
Lightning Transactions are now on WhiteBIT! Faster $BTC transactions via the Lightning Network — using a QR code or payment details. Deposit fee: 0.25% Withdrawal fee: 0.15% Move $BTC at Lightning speed. Learn more: https://t.co/nt0svdMqg5pic.twitter.com/WHfmRKT6QI
“WhiteBIT’s mission is to make blockchain technology accessible and widely adopted by delivering practical, user-friendly solutions for digital assets,” WhiteBIT Founder and CEO Volodymyr Nosov said in a statement.
“Adding Lightning support brings us closer to this goal as we are making Bitcoin faster and more useful for customers who want to top up accounts, send and receive funds, and use Bitcoin across more real-world flows.”
Zug-based WhiteBIT, the 17th biggest exchange by transaction volume, according to CoinGecko data, added that the launch supports a faster Bitcoin rail with use cases for “remittances, exchange funding, merchant-style QR payments, and interoperability with Lightning-enabled wallets and applications.”
Transaction volume on Lightning has surged this year. The reason, broadly, is that exchanges are using the network to move funds because it’s so cheap and fast.
Launched in 2018, Lightning was previously pushed for smaller transactions like tipping or buying a cup of coffee.
The network also offers more privacy than Bitcoin’s main chain: because Lightning payments are settled off-chain rather than recorded on the public blockchain, individual payments are harder to trace.
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