Spiral, a developer group supported by Block, is integrating Bitcoin payments into its Mesh LLM network. The project aims to enable autonomous AI agents to purchase computing power directly from GPU owners using the Lightning Network, bypassing traditional banking systems.
Mesh LLM is a decentralized platform that aggregates idle GPU resources to execute distributed inference for large AI models exceeding 256GB. The system is designed to allow contributors to earn payments for lending their hardware capacity to the network.
As of early October 2026, the payment feature remains under active development with no public release date. The team is currently addressing the technical challenge of verifiable compute, which involves ensuring that buyers receive the requested processing work from anonymous providers.
The development builds upon the Lightning Development Kit and existing infrastructure like the Goose Development Kit. In September 2026, Lightning was integrated into the x402 standard, which is being considered as a potential mechanism for handling AI agent micropayments.
No adoption metrics or transaction volumes are currently available for the project. Future progress will depend on solving verification issues and determining whether the x402 standard will be formally adopted for the payment flow.
