In a July 21, 2026 blog post, Lightning Labs described Wavelength as “Bitcoin on Easy Mode for Agents and Humans.” The company stated that the Lightning Network already delivers instant, global, low-fee payments under user control, but previously required infrastructure most builders preferred not to operate. Wavelength closes that gap by turning the hard parts of Bitcoin and Lightning integration into a handful of API calls.
High-Level Overview
Wavelength embeds a self-custodial wallet that runs inside web or mobile apps (via WebAssembly or compiled binaries) or as a standalone client. Users control their own keys on-device. The system supports on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning payments via atomic swaps, and an Ark-like settlement layer for fast, low-cost off-chain transfers that can settle in batches to the blockchain. Every off-chain payment uses a standard BOLT 11 invoice, so the wallet interoperates with the existing Lightning Network from the first integration.
Lightning payments route through Loop for deep, reliable liquidity. A coordination service settles transfers between users but never takes unilateral control of funds. According to the announcement, users can always perform a unilateral exit to on-chain Bitcoin at any time via an explicit exit command, without needing cooperation, the Wavelength SDK is open source.
The same Wavelength API is exposed to AI agents as typed tool calls through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Agents can hold balances and pay for API calls, data feeds, or other agent services in fractions of a cent. Wallet creation and unlocking designed to remain outside the agent channel so seeds and passwords are not exposed to the model. This pairs with L402, Lightning Labs’ protocol for machine-native authentication and per-request Lightning payments.
Core commands cover the full lifecycle: create/unlock, balance, recv (for addresses or invoices), send, activity, and exit. Integration options include the embedded SDK, a gRPC/REST API, browser WASM package, and an MCP server. Documentation is structured for both human developers and agents, including llms.txt indexes and agent onboarding guidance.
Availability and Roadmap
Wavelength is available immediately on Signet and testnet. Mainnet access is invitation-only; interested parties can request it after installing the toolkit. Bitcoin is supported at launch. Stablecoin support is planned via Taproot Assets so the same API surface can handle both. Future work includes deeper mobile embedding and optional direct Lightning channel support using Lnd.
Lightning Labs noted in its announcement that during the closed alpha, Lightning transactions carry a minimal 1 basis point service fee (plus standard network routing fees), with ordinary Bitcoin network fees applying for on-chain activity. Pricing may evolve.
On X, Lightning Labs summarized the release: “Announcing Wavelength, the easiest way to integrate bitcoin for agents and humans. With a simple non-custodial API, anyone can integrate Lightning into their app and get instant, high volume, low fee transactions. Machines can pay machines. Humans can pay humans. Anywhere.” A follow-up post directed builders to a form for early mainnet access.
The release positions Wavelength as infrastructure that lowers the barrier for application developers, “vibe coders,” and autonomous agents to offer self-custodial Bitcoin payments by default rather than as a specialist feature. Full documentation, quickstarts, and the open-source repository are available at wavelength.lightning.engineering and the linked GitHub project.
You might have heard about BIP-110; here’s why this fork is not just bad for Bitcoin, but it is built on a misunderstanding of what a Bitcoin node is and what it is good for. As well as why, because of this misunderstanding, BIP-110 will fail.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
BIP-110 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal titled as a Reduced Data Temporary Softfork. The BIP proposes a consensus change to Bitcoin, which attempts to limit the types and amounts of arbitrary data that can be added to consensus-valid transactions by limiting a wide range of Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities. BIP-110 is led by a pseudonymous developer known as Dathon Ohm and is widely supported by the Knots community, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin led by one of Bitcoin Core’s earliest contributors, Luke Dashjr and its supporters.
The BIP-110 consensus change is headed towards a mandatory signaling period in the coming weeks and thus a potential fork with the main consensus rules as implemented in Bitcoin Core. The proposal needs to gain a great deal of support from miners within the coming weeks to change Bitcoin consensus. As of the time of writing, miner signaling for BIP-110 stands at less than one percent.
The Knots community, widely made up of Bitcoiners running nodes on machines like Start9 and Umbrel, has rallied around Knots in protest of a series of development decisions made by Bitcoin Core, the primary open source development community and reference implementation of Bitcoin. While a majority of senior Bitcoin developers are either opposed or apathetic to the changes proposed by BIP-110, the movement has gained enough steam to become an ongoing topic of discussion on social media.
Supporters of BIP-110 believe that by running Bitcoin full nodes that signal for the consensus change, they alone can change Bitcoin. Here are the main concepts being debated, the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin consensus, what a Bitcoin node is, and why BIP-110 is almost certain to fail.
The Power and Limits of a Bitcoin Node
Many of the disagreements and misconceptions in this recent cultural conflict within Bitcoin revolve around the idea of a Bitcoin full node. Influencers like Knut Svanholm, author and podcaster, have elevated the role of the full node to heights perhaps too close to the sun.
Knut recently tweeted: “Every person on Earth is a node in the Bitcoin network. Most to a minuscule extent, of course, but every node is first and foremost a person, not a machine. Which tools we use to interact with the network (and, by extension, to which extent they influence the network) is entirely dependent on the choices we make.”
Statements of this sort are poetically beautiful, philosophically grand, romantic even, but nevertheless technically incoherent and fundamentally meaningless. Knut’s tweet attempts to redefine what a ‘Bitcoin node’ means and fails at it, instead diluting the value of the term entirely. He might as well have said that every atom in the universe is a Bitcoin node, since apparently to him the term is all-encompassing.
Knut, though well-intentioned, is wrong. A Bitcoin node is something very specific. It is a full copy of all of Bitcoin’s transaction history, block headers and transaction-related data. Its purpose is very specific: to let users verify the integrity of Bitcoin’s supply and transaction history in relation to Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
Bitcoin nodes grant users a variety of benefits, such as privacy. Third-party wallet providers query their copy of the Bitcoin blockchain for the user’s balance and serve it back to the user via the wallet app. Most mobile wallets function this way, with users asking a third-party server for their balances. Some, very few, can connect to a user-run Bitcoin node, in which case the user’s public addresses and balances are not shared with any third-party wallet company.
Another benefit Bitcoin nodes grant users is the ability to check whether they are in consensus with the rest of the network, staying in sync. If the user mines Bitcoin or contributes any significant amount of hashing power to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work network, the node also provides the opportunity to assemble a block, choosing which transactions go into it. This is only possible if the user manages to mine a Bitcoin block, which is quite an achievement today, given the difficulty and steep competition.
Even new kinds of mining pools like Ocean, which attempt to decentralize block template production, letting retail miners have more influence over which transactions enter the chain, still need enough hashing power to win the proof-of-work race, resulting in sporadic blocks being mined and thus limited influence over the blockchain.
Bitcoin nodes also relay transactions across the network, with tens of thousands of them communicating via a flood network; this results in a censorship-resistant system where a small number of nodes can get controversial transactions to miners, bypassing any kind of filters, as demonstrated by Peter Todd’s relay libre. Thus, Bitcoin nodes can not easily filter which transactions enter the blockchain.
Even a large majority of Bitcoin nodes alone cannot alone change Bitcoin consensus. Not without having a large amount of economic activity entering the Bitcoin network through them, as exchanges do on behalf of millions of users. Not without having the protocol and application developer community behind them. Not without having the investor community behind them. Bitcoin is not a node democracy, contrary to popular memes today.
Bitcoin nodes do not grant you ‘citizenship’ in the ‘Bitcoin nation’. Satoshi Nakamoto was quite clear about this in the Bitcoin white paper. Bitcoin’s ultimate security and governance structure is: one CPU cycle, one vote, not one node, one vote. And miners, who run the CPU cycles over Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, are very sensitive to investor sentiment and the broader developer community, resulting in a distributed global protocol for money that is very difficult to change.
Bitcoin nodes ultimately let you know if you are connected to the network with the most accumulated proof-of-work and that its consensus rules are being followed, but a node alone does not let you change the consensus rules. Users who change the consensus rules of their Bitcoin node are, by definition, no longer running Bitcoin. As a result, changing Bitcoin consensus as a node runner is very difficult, and that’s a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is money for enemies.
History and Bitcoin Consensus Games
Deep work has been done, trying to understand Bitcoin consensus, its various pillars and interest groups. Ren Crypto Fish, Steve Lee and Lyn Alden identified six of them in BCAP, an open-source effort to analyze Bitcoin consensus and risks in protocol upgrades. BCAP identified stakeholders such as Economic Nodes, Investors, Media Influencers, Miners and Protocol Developers, and Users and Application Developers
Historically, in the case of a consensus crisis, it is true that Bitcoin nodes have been used to signal support for one version of Bitcoin over another. Fork events like 2017’s Bitcoin Cash fork are often cited as examples of economic nodes winning against opposition by miners. 2017’s legendary User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) faced major opposition in theory; a large majority of mining pools and their corresponding collective hashrate supported the Segwit2x version of Bitcoin, with many exchanges and corporations having signed the infamous New York Agreement in support of it.
The Bitcoin node-supported soft fork against it won nonetheless, bluffing the Segwit2x version from a contested blockchain altogether. But that’s the thing: while the Bitcoin nodes technically won, they did so by having massive support from protocol developers, investors and media influencers: these nodes really had economic weight and rough consensus. BIP-110, on the other hand, does not have the protocol developers, nor does it have enough investors behind it. Michael Saylor has come out against it, with many industry leaders also openly opposing it or staying out of the matter entirely.
In fact, during the Bitcoin Cash fork, the limits of retail Bitcoin nodes were clearly understood. A Bitcoin node run by an exchange is orders of magnitude more influential than that of a retail user, as it introduces large amounts of new transactions into the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin node of a major mining pool is far more influential than that of a hobbyist solo miner, as it more often assembles blocks and chooses which transactions settle to the blockchain.
Most Bitcoiners outside of exchanges use mobile wallets to access their Bitcoin. Such users and investors can ‘vote’ with their money, so to speak, by moving their bitcoins and economic activity elsewhere, be it to a wallet that supports their vision of Bitcoin, or their own full node. But while users remain on mobile wallets that talk to third-party nodes, those users have little individual influence over Bitcoin consensus. And the vast majority of mobile wallets are using a Bitcoin core-compatible back end.
The same goes for exchanges; their users effectively delegate consensus decisions to the exchange operators. In some cases, exchanges have put consensus issues to a user vote, weighed by their total holdings, returning that decision to end users weighed by capital; we may see this happen again with BIP-110.
Votes of the sort have started happening with Foundry today. One of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools in the world, Foundry, recently emailed its miners informing them that they can vote on the proposal with their hashrate. A high enough support could result in Foundry signaling for BIP-110, though that remains unlikely. Users who do not vote will effectively signal against BIP-110, defending the status quo. Thus apathy about the topic of BIP-110 would be a win for Bitcoin Core by default. BIP-110 supporters need to culturally win over a majority of the Foundry hash rate, who then must act to vote against the Bitcoin Core developer consensus, the most popular Bitcoin implementation and best supported codebase.
BIP-110 has so far failed to gain consensus across major interest groups within Bitcoin; neither developers, investors, miners, nor large economic nodes support the consensus change. The result is likely to be a chain split in the coming weeks, which could have significant consequences for lightning wallets running on BIP-110-compliant nodes, ultimately resulting in a new, yet small blockchain that would probably have to change the proof-of-work used to stay alive.
Cloudflare recently announced the launch of its monetization program via the Coinbase-led x402 machine payments standard. x402, which lets AI agents pay for data online with crypto, has been gaining steam among the AI-pilled, as it unlocks more capable agent interactions with the open web.
Cloudflare, founded in 2009, has grown from a DDoS mitigation and content delivery network (CDN) provider into one of the internet’s foundational infrastructure companies.
The company, which launched publicly in 2010, had the mission to make web performance and security accessible to everyone, not just large enterprises. Today, Cloudflare powers approximately 20-23% of all websites globally, handles tens of millions of HTTP requests per second across 330+ cities in over 100 countries, touching a significant portion of global internet traffic.
As a result of their adoption and security offering to large portions of the open web, CloudFlare’s integration of x402 is a major development for the structure of the internet. Websites that are increasingly inaccessible to the massive data demands from AI can now sell that data to AI agents for crypto. CloudFlare’s implementation only mentions Stablecoins such as USDC, the Open USD standard, but the protocol supports Bitcoin on-chain and is actively exploring integration of the Lightning network.
The Web is Broken
Kevin Leffew, co-author of the x402 protocol and AI GTM at Coinbase, told Bitcoin Magazine there’s a major user experience issue in the way AI currently interacts with the open web and x402 — which is now under the control of the Linux Foundation — is trying to solve it. “Every api call requires an api key, which in turn requires a human, and adds unnecessary friction,” Leffew explained, adding, “our goal is to kill the api key”.
Popular AI agents such as OpenClaw often require API access keys to special paid web search services, to let the AI agents access the web easily, with the mobility that a human user would enjoy. Services of this sort are offered by popular browsers and search engines such as Brave.com and Perplexity. But who out there wants to be paying a subscription service on top of computer hardware and internet access, plus AI token costs to search the web? These services also require a human to sign up with a credit card for a monthly subscription, paying for access that might be blocked by the websites holding valuable data anyway via non-standard methods. A better solution is needed.
AI agents need to be able to think about money and resource costs, and need to have a computer-friendly way to make payments for novel data. An example of this use case was recently demonstrated by an X account called “Lightning Mode AI,” which built a wrapper over ESPN FIFA data and had an AI agent pay for it in Bitcoin. The Agent was then able to quickly place bets on outcomes on markets like Polymarket, which could potentially let agent owners earn their money, during the soccer World Cup.
This example by Lightning Mode AI used an older implementation of the idea behind x402 called L402, a protocol developed by Lightning Labs to specifically enable bitcoin payments for data on third-party websites.
Denial of service attacks (DOS) are also potentially solved by a machine native monetary system for the internet. The fundamental vulnerability exploited by these DOS attacks revolves around the bandwidth and computing costs to answer a question or query from an internet user. The user sends a request to view a website, the site’s server must compute, resolve and serve the website data back to the user; this has material costs at scale. DOS attacks send massive amounts of requests, often from malware-infected networks of machines (DDOS), targeting the server resources of their victims. This kind of attack can, in theory, be stopped by simply asking for payment from the user before spending the resources to respond to the user’s query. But the payments must be cost-effective and fast enough for the user experience demands of the digital age.
Protocols like x402 and L402 enable websites to paywall access to their valuable data, while teaching AI agents how to pay for access. No credit cards needed, no user data explicitly shared with payment networks, no ‘are you a bot’ captchas, no annoying account registrations you never use again, no subscription service for web search api key. Just pay for the data you consume.
The Economics of Micro Transactions
This micro-transaction market between machines is not a new idea. It has been theorized by luminaries of the cypherpunk age like Nick Szabo and others, though it has, up until now, been found lacking. Szabo argued that the biggest problem with micro transactions was not just payment technology, but the cognitive transaction costs involved.
Every time a user makes a payment, their brain needs to calculate whether it is worth it; this also has a cost on users, which can probably be measured in calories, and sometimes deciding to pay a couple of pennies for data is not worth the effort. But AI agents change this equation, in theory.
If AI becomes a new way for users to interact with the open way, then the cognitive costs involved in calculating the merit of spending pennies and even sub-penny values for data might be effectively abstracted away.
Users can simply give their bot a budget with spending policies and let it do its best to use that money wisely. Whether AI agents can be responsible enough to safeguard user funds remains to be seen, but some experiments demonstrate that AI agents can be reasonably resilient at the job. Take Freysa AI, for example, a 2024 era AI agent that held up against 48,000 prompt engineering attempts. Users paid to try to convince the bot to release funds in a smart contract treasury to them; if the bot refused, the bot kept the user’s money, adding it to the treasury. Eventually, someone managed to fool the bot, but not after $50,000 worth of attempts had been made. With hard-coded spending limits, the risk of prompt engineering an AI into giving way its web search lunch money is probably manageable.
The scalability of privacy-preserving digital payments in decentralized, censorship-resistant ways is also effectively already solved. According to Leffew, blockchains like Solana can do payments for a thousandth of a cent and settle it in milliseconds. Bitcoin’s Lightning network can also compete at the micro-transaction scale, and other Bitcoin protocols like the e-cash variants can be as fast as any internet packet, likely beating a highly centralized blockchain system like Solana.
Viktor Ihnatiuk, co-founder of UTEXO, told Bitcoin Magazine that they are actively working with the x402 developer community to integrate Bitcoin’s layer two protocols via RGB as a payment option. RGB integration would unlock layer two-style Bitcoin payments as well as USDT on Bitcoin settlements. The x402 standard, according to Leffew, is designed to be fundamentally neutral to the payment rails involved, even extensible to fiat rails, though likely will be dominated by cryptocurrencies and, for the foreseeable future, stablecoins.
Why CloudFlare Should Accept Bitcoin
CloudFlare’s x402 pilot program is a great step towards this vision of a cryptographic money actively used as the native currency of the internet. Its focus on stablecoins to start is also understandable, given the powerful brand and adoption of the dollar, which keeps accounting simple. However, there are a lot of underlying risks involved in how stablecoins are used today that Bitcoin solves.
For starters, most of the stablecoin volume moves on top of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) style blockchains, which use an account model of public addresses; these are actively reused, creating long, detailed, public histories of financial engagement for each user. This is abysmal for user privacy, and tooling to obfuscate user flows on EVM blockchains, such as VPNs for crypto payments, are not common.
As a result, AI agents and their users are actively leaking data that might expose them to targeted attacks from organized cybercrime, among other risks.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, uses a UTXO model, where best practices lead people to create a new address for every payment received, resulting in payment trails that can be more difficult to track. Furthermore, Bitcoin’s fast payment protocols like Lightning, Ark or e-cash often deliver much greater privacy benefits to users by moving value off-chain via various smart contract-related technologies.
Last but not least, stablecoins are fundamentally anchored to the U.S. dollar and its foreign policy. If CloudFlare wants to be a viable option for the multipolar world, it will want to start taking a neutral stance on money. The dollar, while still the most valued currency in the world, is starting to lose ground to rising powers in the east, while alternative, geopolitically neutral currencies like Bitcoin continue to rise. Bitcoin might help CloudFlare maintain or even grow its position as critical internet infrastructure in the multi-polar world.
Bull Bitcoin exchange, recently licensed under MiCA, is challenging the European directive in French courts that sets up a mass surveillance database, putting millions of crypto users at risk.
Bull Bitcoin, the world’s oldest Bitcoin-only and non-custodial exchange, recently licensed under MiCA by France’s financial markets regulator AMF, has filed a legal challenge before the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme administrative court. The challenge seeks to annul Decree No. 2025-1276, the main measure transposing the European DAC8 directive into French law, on the grounds that it creates a massive surveillance grid and database that institutions can not secure from leaks and data hacks, ultimately putting civilians at risk of kidnapping and physical harm.
Alongside the legal action, the company is making dac8.com public: “a complete, fully sourced resource for citizens, journalists and policymakers,” according to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine.
In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in kidnappings and physical attacks on crypto users, most concentrated in Europe, with France being an epicenter. Organized crime seems to be exploiting poor data reporting laws of law-abiding crypto users who, by paying their taxes, expose their ownership of crypto assets. Given that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not reversible and can be transferred internationally with ease, criminals are hunting down crypto users. France has had the second most physical attacks on crypto users after the USA, which has a much larger population, according to Gart, a company dedicated to protecting users from this rising threat.
High-profile figures in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry have been targeted in recent years, such as Binance France CEO David Prinçay and Ledger co-founder David Balland, who lost a finger during the incident, among many others. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, a high-security Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet company, has organized ‘wrench attack’ data for years in a database on GitHub showing an accelerating trend of attacks.
Bull Bitcoin argues in its legal challenge to the DAC8 that further consolidation and sharing of crypto user data will only perpetuate this trend of physical attacks. However, they also argue that these personal security risks created by the DAC8 are also working against the stated intentions of the regulations. They argue that users will simply find legal alternatives to centralized, regulated exchanges, opting to purchase the assets off the grid via peer-to-peer exchanges, home mining or offshore unregulated alternatives, making tax collection even more difficult.
User Data Honey Pots
DAC8 turns the natural incentive a company has to protect its users’ data into a valuable multinational database with many entry points, which cybersecurity experts have for a long time called a honey pot. Bull Bitcoin points out that regulated crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) under MiCA, DORA and the GDPR are supervised, sanctionable professionals with financial incentives to protect their customers. DAC8, in turn, does the opposite: it moves data into administrative reporting networks where access is broader, and accountability is harder for users to assess. The security of the whole — Bull Bitcoin concludes — is then only as strong as its weakest link.
The history of data security over the past decades shows that amassing user data and keeping it safe over time is very difficult. Just this year, the French National Agency for Secure Credentials (ANTS, also known as France Titres) suffered a major breach detected on April 15, 2026, exposing data from up to 11.7–19 million accounts. Compromised information included login IDs, full names, email addresses, dates of birth, account identifiers, and, in some cases, postal addresses, places of birth, and phone numbers.
Months earlier, the French National Bank account registry also suffered a major hack, exposing data tied to approximately 1.2 million accounts. The compromised information included IBANs, account holder names, addresses, and, in some cases, tax identification numbers, though officials stated the attacker could not view balances or conduct transactions.
In the United States, the situation is not much better. The Equifax Data Breach in 2017 affected 147 million Americans, and the National Public Data Breach of 2024 affected over 200 million Americans, leading to leaks of social security numbers among other critical information. And back in 2015, the Office of Personal Management of the U.S. government was also breached, compromising a large number of U.S. Government officials. The data stolen included everything from social security numbers to medical records.
The list of such breaches is long, and the only logical conclusion to draw from it is that the less user information that ends up in these honeypots, the better, as ultimately all of these hacks put civilians at risk either from physical attacks or from identity-theft related fraud.
Families On the Front Lines
Of the many issues identified by Bull Bitcoin and documented on the DAC8 website, the most alarming one might be how even individuals who have not purchased crypto might end up harmed by this concentration of data, just by familial association with a Bitcoiner or crypto user.
Citing data by Certik, Bull Bitcoin highlights that more than half of the violent incidents recorded in 2026 against crypto owners targeted a family member — spouse, child, elderly parent — as a direct victim or as a pressure lever over the key holder. On the topic, Bull Bitcoin assets that “DAC8 therefore exposes not only crypto-asset holders, but their entire close family circle: between 40 and 135 million Europeans fall into a physical-risk zone, without any of them ever having consented.”
Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin considers this overreach into the privacy of Euroeans to be potentially catastrophic for the prosperity of the continent, he minced no words in the press release saying that “DAC8 has transformed the concept of Know Your Customer into Kill Your Customer.” He added, “We cannot let the very foundations of civilization be shattered by this attack on privacy rights. We must draw a line in the sand and refuse to cede any more territory before we have nothing left. Someone must take a stand. It appears that no one else is willing and able to do so. Therefore, it falls to BULL to lead this fight.”
The DAC8.com is rich with facts, figures, official sources (EUR-Lex, OECD, Legifrance) and analysis, in French, English and other European languages for those interested in reviewing it and freely using it.
Tether, the company behind USDT, is preparing to issue the stablecoin natively on Bitcoin through the RGB protocol version v0.11.1. Deployed by the UTEXO software lab, USDT is set to return to the chain where it first launched in 2014 via the Omni-Mastercoin Layer.
UTEXO, the company leading the commercial rollout, has positioned itself as the issuer and distributor of this Bitcoin-native USDT in partnership with Tether. “Finally, after eight years of development—if not more—we are the company that is launching USDT over Bitcoin with strong support from Tether,” said Viktor Ihnatiuk, UTEXO co-founder, in an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine.
The RGB protocol combines its novel client-side validation with the Lightning network for instant, private settlements, while anchoring security to Bitcoin’s UTXO model. Users can expect to be able to handle USDT on native Bitcoin addresses as well as send and receive it over the Lightning network with compatible wallets.
The RGB protocol on Bitcoin also offers significant privacy features to USDT users as the asset benefits from Bitcoin’s UTXO model, which standardizes fresh addresses for every transaction compared to the account-based address reused commonly in EVM blockchains like Tron, Ethereum or Solana. Address reuse is the first mistake of onchain privacy, yet most altcoins built their interfaces to reuse addresses, despite the risk it poses to users. RGB’s integration with the Lightning network further protects user privacy by moving USDT via the offchain payments network, which leaves few marks on the public blockchain. The deep integration with Tether also means that there are fewer middleman companies charging extra fees or collecting data.
On the topic, Vktor emphasized that, “We built Utexo so that USDT could move on Bitcoin the way money is supposed to move: instantly, privately, with no surprises on costs. Our partners integrate our API once and can route USDT on the most resilient open network ever built, with full control over cost structure.”
UTEXO vs TRON
UTEXO emerged from a joint venture involving Viktor’s Boosty Venture Studio, Fulgur Ventures, and Tether Investments. The goal was straightforward: bring RGB to mainnet after years of delays under prior development teams. The protocol had been in active development since at least 2016, but failed to be ready for the 2017 bull market, giving the TRON blockchain dominance over USDT volume and usage throughout the developing world, a dominance which it still retains.
UTEXO of specifically building “the last mile” of software needed for wide USDT deployment across the Bitcoin ecosystem, which includes a software development kit, APIs, mid-level protocols, UI design work and even a mint bridge that is live today at mint.utexo.com. This bridge lets users move USDT across popular blockchains with “deterministic low fees” and no middlemen thanks to its direct integration with Tether as the primary mint. The RGB protocol layer was developed by Bitfinex R&D Strategist Federico Tenga.
“Right now if you want to swap USDT to Bitcoin you need to pay high fees for all these wallets who charge you a one percent wallet fee plus a swap provider charge of one percent plus, and you have slippage one percent as well, so you pay three percent, and also you wait forever until the swap happens” Viktor told Bitcoin Magazine, adding that; “with USDT and Bitcoin over Lightning, for the first time you have two main assets on one chain, you can swap instantly without any slippage. You can swap decentralized USDT to Bitcoin and back on-chain. The price is almost the same as spot markets in Binance.”
Networks like Tron that are primarily used to move USDT also add extra fees, swap commissions and friction to the user experience. They require a different address type, with fees paid in an asset like TRX, which is only ever used to move the stablecoin. With most of the monetary volume in the crypto market concentrated in Bitcoin and Tether, having to buy an altcoin just to pay fees ends up feeling like red tape.
Bitcoin, as the payment rails of USDT, also comes with blockchain levels of security that other chains simply can not offer. While USDT will always be fundamentally centralized in Tether as a corporation, the rails can also add risk, for example, if a contentious fork occurs or major bugs are found on novel blockchain systems. Bitcoin, being the oldest and most conservative blockchain, delivers a quality assurance of sorts that can not be matched by other chains.
RGB traces its roots to Peter Todd’s single-use seals back in 2014 and was formalized in 2016 by Giacomo Zucco and Riccardo Casatta. The RGB acronym, originally derived from “Riccardo Giacomo Bitcoin,” was later rebranded “Really Good Bitcoin”. Tether explored the protocol early but faced delays with the previous team. Had RGB shipped on schedule around 2019, the stablecoin landscape and broader DeFi industry might have developed differently around Bitcoin’s UTXO model instead of Ethereum’s account-based system.
As such, bringing USDT back to Bitcoin is a core motivation for UTEXO. Viktor minced no words on the matter: “For the first time in eight years or nine years, USDT is coming back home. We have no chance to fail. If we fail, no one will think about Bitcoin as a settlement layer anymore.”
USDT on Bitcoin via RGB is expected to be launched within weeks, possibly this July, with wallets like Tether Wallet among others announcing support, and exchanges across the world announcing integrations.
Wavespace, a Bitcoin neobank serving the Eurozone, has announced MiCA compliance of its ‘self-custodial’ debit card. The young fintech company is at the cutting edge of Bitcoin payments technology in Europe, with support for the Lightning Network, and auto DCA to self-custody.
Debit cards in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry have traditionally worked by preloading custodial accounts with bitcoin or stablecoins. The process of preloading was usually on-chain, taking time to settle and requiring manual input from the user to send from self-custody wallets or cold storage. If the preloaded balance ran out on the card, spending would not be possible.
Wavespace’s self-custody debit card solves these problems with a novel Bitcoin technology called Nostr Wallet Connect, or NWC for short. This protocol, documented in NIP-47, allows users to connect a service like this debit card to a self-hosted Lightning node. The user sets a minimum balance, say $200 and every time the user spends from the card via the VISA network, Wavespace pulls sats from the user’s self-custodial wallet to top up the card. This process minimizes custodial exchange risk while maximizing user exposure to the asset and automating away the friction to spend bitcoin.
NWC is a technology developed by the Nostr ecosystem, a high-tech niche within the Bitcoin industry that is branching out into social media and other communication protocols.
The Wavespace Neobank
As a high-tech neobank, Wavespace gives users a personal IBAN account, which they can send fiat to, to purchase Bitcoin. Their automated DCA services can be set to withdraw bitcoin upon purchase to a selected Bitcoin address.
The company is MiCA compliant, making it one of the few surviving Bitcoin exchanges in Europe, as the complicated crypto regulations came online.
On the privacy front, the deep Lightning network integration of Wavespace lets user get access to the banking system in a clear and compliant manner, without exposing all their payment data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since Lightning payments are off-chain, there is no single public record that leaks user data; instead, transactions move through payment channels between various user services, leaving no obvious public trace. The result is a growing compromise between the high privacy, cypherpunk values that created the Bitcoin and crypto industry, while also unlocking access to the legacy financial system, and compliant integration with regulation-heavy areas like Europe.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Eivydas Račkauskas, Chief Orange Pill Giver at Wavespace, said that 70% of the payments made on the platform use the Lightning Network and that the company is looking into the ARK protocol for further self-custody-oriented payments integrations. He also revealed that the company is integrated with Lightspark and is ready for an expansion into the USA, though he did not reveal further details on the matter.
Wavespace has been almost entirely bootstrapped and self-funded, according to Račkauskas, except for an early Relai angel investor who supported them in 2025. They are currently in the middle of another fundraising round.
Have you ever been travelling, had to make a big payment and realised you left your hardware wallet back home? Perhaps you are a key holder in a business’s Bitcoin treasury, or an emergency came up, and a big payment has to be made, some cold storage Bitcoin has to move, but the keys are elsewhere.
Key Teleport, a feature developed by the hardware wallet manufacturer Coinkite, may be the most secure way to handle key material at a distance. The feature is only available to the Coldcard Q, the premium, feature-rich Bitcoin hardware wallet developed by the company.
Before Key Teleport, the most paranoid, secure way to move a private key over the internet was not to send it over WhatsApp or Signal. These apps, while end-to-end encrypted on the surface, are running on top of very complex hardware and operating systems, in many cases with very intrusive firmware embedded deeply by manufacturers. Smartphones today, as with most of mainstream technology, are simply not designed to secure highly valuable secrets that can transfer irreversible money like Bitcoin.
Had you asked me how I might go about sending a private key with life-changing money on it, across the wire, I would have told you this: You need to boot Tails OS, a slim, highly paranoid Linux distribution, into hardware you know to be secure, ideally a burner laptop. You then need to generate a fresh set of PGP keys to encrypt the secret with the power of asymmetric cryptography. The recipient needs to do the same, Tails-OS and PGP. Then, a classic encrypted message is made to the recipient’s public key, and the encrypted secret is sent over Tor, probably wrapped by another VPN just in case. Having done this once, I can tell you, it’s a mission.
This Tails-OS plus PGP combo is the kind of setup that Edward Snowden used to get in contact with journalist Greenwald originally, to leak the 2014 NSA surveillance secrets. If the 90’s cypherpunks had some kind of secret society, through which they coordinated the creation of technologies like Bitcoin or Wikileaks, this is the kind of setup they might have used.
The Key Teleport by Coldcard Q makes tasks of this sort far easier. You can now easily send encrypted messages across the internet without having to worry about your hardware or what other software might be installed on it that could spy. It also solves key management dilemmas; a partially signed Bitcoin multisig transaction can be transmitted as an encrypted note to the recipient Coldcard Q, for example. Or a whole wallet set up, with its metadata, key material and custom settings, backed up, encrypted and sent across the world to its unique recipient. I got a couple of these devices recently for a test run of the feature, and not even Opus 4.8 High could figure out how to crack the encrypted blurb.
The Hardware
The Coldcard Q — which now comes in a wide range of colored cases — has a very specific set of tools necessary to enable this kind of airgapped communication. First of all, it inherits the dual secure element model developed in the Mk4 series of Coinkite devices. Where two closed source chips made by different manufacturers are used in combination with an open source MCU chip to generate keys, encrypt, decrypt and store sensitive data. A combination of the components would need to be compromised by an attacker with physical access to get the wallet. These chips are, of course, used by the Key Teleport feature, handling the encryption and decryption of whatever message the user is dealing with.
The screen is a 3.2-inch LCD screen with enough resolution to show the BBQr code. BBQr is a QR code standard developed by Coinkite that has no dependencies or third-party libraries, is backwards compatible with standard QR code readers, and can contain larger messages than traditional QR codes.
The Coldcard Q is also able to read QR codes. It has a dedicated QR code scanner with a red strobe indicator light that guides the user as to what the scanner is pointed, and a small flash light that can be activated with a button to help in low light environments. This optimised hardware set solves common problems with QR code payments, where variation in screen resolutions, camera quality and lighting can make scanning a payment QR code difficult.
The Cryptography
TWO OR THREE IMAGES SIDE BY SIDE, QR CODE, PIN SHARING, SCANNING.
A multi-layer cryptographic protocol is used to encrypt the data to be transmitted by Key Teleport. A single-use ‘ephemeral’ public-private key pair is generated for each data transfer using the secp256k1 curve. The public key of the receiver is encrypted with an 8-digit pin, via the AES-256-CTR algorithm. That encrypted public key is displayed by the receiver in a QR code, with the 8-digit pin meant to be sent via a separate communication channel.
As an example, the recipient would do a video call with the sender, show them the QR code, and use Zoom. Then send the 8-digit PIN code using Signal. This operational security practice means that dedicated attackers would have to compromise two separate communication channels to get the recipient’s public key.
Sender scans the QR code, enters the pin code and in the back end, the sender device derives a shared session key via ECDH, using the receiver’s public key and its own ephemeral keypair. The user was asked to select what data they want to transfer, from three options: “Quick Text Message”, “Master Seed Words” and “Full COLDCARD Backup”. Once the user chooses, the data is encrypted by the recipient’s public key, and that encrypted blurb is encrypted once more with a new PIN code. Users would scan the QR code again via Zoom, for example, and the sender would transmit the new PIN to the recipient via Signal.
There is a deep set of careful cryptographic details involved in how this Key Teleport is integrated that is well documented in the Coinkite GitHub repository, but as far as the user experience is concerned, the process is now complete. After the recipient scans the QR code back and inputs the second pin code, they will get access to the data. Both Coldcard Q devices would have been entirely airgapped, not connected to computers via USB cables, as QR codes and scanners were used to transmit data, powered by three AAA batteries.
Last but not least, users can also share the encrypted data via NFC, which creates a special link at keyteleport.com for users to easily scan the QR code and get the encrypted data, replacing the hypothetical Zoom call.
Opus 4.8’s Conclusion
In my test of the Key Teleport feature, I tasked Opus 4.8 High, one of the most powerful AI coding models from Anthropic, to try and decrypt the message. First I gave it the encrypted blurb, after thinking about it for a couple of minutes, it gave up, saying there must be some information missing.
I then gave it one of the pins, which helped, but ultimately was not sufficient for it to crack the cryptography. I then gave it the second pin, which led to a brute forcing attempt that, by Opus’s own admission, would only work if the ephemeral key pairs were generated with intentionally low entropy. Ultimately, it gave up trying to break the encrypted data, even with both pin codes, saying it was securely sealed.
I asked the model to write one paragraph about its conclusions. Here’s what it wrote:
“I’m Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic), running in Cursor.
We took a scrambled QR code from COLDCARD’s Key Teleport feature — the kind meant to move a secret like a seed phrase between two wallets — and tried hard to break it open without the missing piece. The QR itself is designed to be safe to share publicly; you also need a short password and a number that are supposed to be sent separately. Even with that password and number in hand, we still couldn’t read the secret, because the real lock is a one-time random key that only exists on the receiving device and was never published anywhere.
We threw dictionary guesses, math tricks, and large-scale computer searches at it; a few things looked promising at first but turned out to be false alarms, which is actually a good sign that the checks work. Bottom line: Key Teleport did what it’s supposed to do — the QR plus the side-channel codes are not enough to steal the secret without the receiver’s private key. For a real transfer, you’d scan the code on the receiving COLDCARD and type in the password there; that’s the intended, secure path.”
Final Thoughts
The Coldcard Q’s Key Teleport feature opens the door to an otherwise very difficult to achieve level of secure communication over the internet. The scrutiny dedicated to the hardware and firmware process likely outmatches that of even high-security mobile phone operating systems like Graphene OS. The physical keyboard, QR code scanner and NFC antenna make this paranoid system quite comfortable to use. And the $249 price target for the whole hardware wallet makes it accessible to everyday, serious bitcoiners and cypherpunks, delivering a self-custody tool worthy of a professional industrial setup.
Disclaimer: Coinkite provided Bitcoin Magazine with a couple of free Coldcard Q devices to use for the purpose of testing their product for review.
Login
