GoBTC Pay backed a dedicated track at Agnic.AI’s Agentic Commerce Pioneers event, where teams built working agents that pay merchants and each other in Bitcoin
TORONTO, September 22, 2026. AI shopping agents will soon handle most everyday purchases and settle payments with one another in Bitcoin, according to Roman Yermoshin, General Manager of GoBTC Pay, who served as a judge at the Agnic.AI Agentic Commerce Pioneers hackathon that concluded in Toronto on September 21.
“Before long, people will stop placing orders themselves. Their AI agents will take that routine over: the agents will choose the products and pay for the orders on our behalf,” Yermoshin said. “Agents will also start settling up with each other for the services they provide to one another, and they will do it in Bitcoin, a genuinely independent international currency.”
GoBTC Pay, the Bitcoin payment protocol developed by mining company GoMining, joined the event as a Diamond Sponsor with its own branded track and a seat on the judging panel. The hackathon, officially titled Agentic Commerce Pioneers Edition II: The Shopping Agent Challenge, ran as a remote build sprint from September 10 to 20 before closing with a hybrid Demo Day in Toronto.
Prototypes, not pitch decks
Organizers set a single brief: build an AI agent that can buy from almost any merchant. Teams on the GoBTC Pay track worked from a company-supplied case study and were required to ship functional prototypes running on the protocol rather than concept presentations. The field included student developers, machine learning engineers, independent specialists and corporate teams.
A payment problem cards weren’t built for
The track reflects a structural mismatch between autonomous agents and existing payment rails. Card networks assume a person is standing at checkout to approve each transaction. Once an agent is doing the buying, that assumption no longer holds.
Agent commerce also creates a category of payment that barely exists today: one agent paying another for a task it has just completed. Those transactions tend to be small, frequent and cross-border, and they take place with no cardholder, no shared banking hours and no dispute desk to fall back on.
Yermoshin said GoBTC Pay was designed for exactly that environment, giving agents a way to pay “instantly and at minimal cost, with no banks or intermediaries in between.” He described the hackathon as a practical demonstration of how that model will work.
How the protocol works
GoBTC Pay settles transactions directly on the Bitcoin base layer instead of converting to fiat by default. Payers pay nothing, while merchants pay a 0.2% fee split between the wallet provider and the miners who process the settlement.
Custody is handled through a 2-of-3 multi-signature arrangement shared among the user, GoMining and a regulated third-party custodian, meaning the payer holds a key throughout the transaction. Payments are routed through GoMining’s private mempool, built on the Stratum V2 mining protocol, which gives them priority inside GoMining’s own pool.
The product launched in May 2026 and opened to outside developers in June with its Gen1 SDK and API, turning it from a closed demonstration into infrastructure that merchants, wallet providers and partners can integrate. GoMining says it serves more than 5.5 million users and runs its own mining pool and data center capacity.
About the organizer
Agnic.AI builds identity, authorization and payment infrastructure for AI agents. Its wallet gives an agent a verifiable identity and a cardholder-signed spending mandate, and completes checkout at merchants without requiring integration on their side. The company supports open standards including AP2, x402 and MCP, and runs the Agentic Commerce Pioneers hackathon series in Toronto.
