Friday is here, and our latest Computing on Bitcoin News is out! Discover our curated selection of articles on Bitcoin scalability and programmability. Check it out below 👇

Our CTO @sdlerner and CSO @afutoransky (Futo) will be presenting at the Workshop on Cryptography for Bitcoin, co-located with the Science of Blockchain Conference 2026 at Stanford on July 31. Workshop details: The paper, "From cut-and-choose to constant-size proofs of garbling correctness," tackles a bottleneck behind Bitcoin bridges, vaults, and covenant-like constructions: proving a garbled circuit was built honestly, without the communication and storage costs of cut-and-choose.

HTTP has had a "Payment Required" status code for thirty years. It was almost never used, as there was no payment coordination layer behind it worth using. The agentic web changes that. Autonomous agents need to pay per request: an API call, a file, an inference, with no processor nor channel to keep open. x402 is the protocol that makes this possible. Bit2 is the clearing and coordination layer it was missing. We built bit2/x402: an Express middleware that turns any endpoint into a pay-per-request resource. One line of code. Verification is client-side, immediate, and needs no third party to clear. Find out how we made this possible:

Our series on Bit2's features continues. This time: client-side smart contracts and what programmable payment logic looks like when it doesn't touch the blockchain. Most smart contracts run on every validating node. That makes computation expensive, public, and limited by network throughput. But most payment logic, like spending policies, rate limits, authorizations, conditional transfers, only involves the parties in the payment. Bit2 keeps it that way. A lightweight virtual machine lets users define programmable spending policies directly in their wallet. No third-party custody, no blockchain execution costs, no global consensus for decisions that don't require it. For autonomous agents managing funds without human supervision, this isn't optional. It's infrastructure. Latest entry in our series on the features defining Bit2, Fairgate's Bitcoin-native payment layer for the agentic economy and the world of autonomous commerce already upon us.

Our series on Bit2's features continues. This time: what self-custody actually means in a Layer 2 payment network. Holding your private keys is only part of the story. A user truly controls their assets only if they can spend them, recover them, and withdraw them under adverse conditions. Three properties determine whether that's real: Unilateral Access, Uncensorable Exit, and Mass Exit Safety. Most networks satisfy one or two during normal operation. The real test is whether all three hold when everything goes wrong simultaneously. Bit2 was designed around that standard from the start. Discover the latest entry in our series on the features defining Bit2, Fairgate's Bitcoin-native payment layer for the agentic economy.

Our series on Bit2's features continues! Today we go back to the foundation: the premise and architectural principles that shaped everything else. Most systems start with a technology and search for a use case. Bit2 started the other way around. In 2025, we asked a simpler question: what properties must a payment network have to support agentic commerce? Every architectural decision followed from there. The answer became a premise and a set of principles, each one designed to eliminate an entire class of future bottlenecks, trust assumptions, or privacy failures before a single line of code was written. Thirteenth entry in our series on the features defining Fairgate's Bit2 and the agentic economy already upon us.

Payment speed, peer-to-peer neutrality, and the privacy-compliance tradeoff in stablecoin infrastructure. These are the questions shaping agentic payment architecture right now, and they are no longer theoretical. We cover all of it in the latest Agentic Economy Briefing 👇