Teams at Agnic.AI's Agentic Commerce Pioneers event shipped working prototypes that let AI agents pay merchants and each other in Bitcoin

TORONTO, September 22, 2026 (Cyprus-based) GoBTC Pay, the Bitcoin payment protocol built by mining company GoMining, has backed Agnic.AI's Agentic Commerce Pioneers Edition II hackathon as a Diamond Sponsor, running a dedicated track in which developers built AI agents that pay for goods and services in Bitcoin.

The event, billed as "The Shopping Agent Challenge," ran as a remote build sprint from September 10 to 20 and wrapped with a hybrid Demo Day in Toronto on September 21. Organizers challenged participants to build an AI agent capable of buying from almost any merchant. Teams on the GoBTC Pay track worked from a company-provided case study and were required to deliver functional prototypes on the protocol, not pitch decks.

Participants ranged from student developers and machine learning engineers to independent specialists and corporate teams.

Why agents need a different payment rail

The track targets a growing gap in how online payments work. Card networks assume a human is present at checkout to approve a transaction. Autonomous shopping agents remove that person from the loop.

Agent-driven commerce also introduces a transaction type that barely exists today: one AI agent paying another for a service it has just performed. These payments tend to be small, frequent and often cross-border, with no cardholder, no shared banking hours and no dispute desk to fall back on.

Roman Yermoshin, General Manager at GoBTC Pay and a member of the hackathon's judging panel, said the shift is closer than many expect.

"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."

He added that GoBTC Pay lets agents make those payments "instantly and at minimal cost, with no banks or intermediaries in between," and described the hackathon as a practical demonstration of that model.

How GoBTC Pay works

GoBTC Pay settles transactions directly on the Bitcoin base layer rather than converting to fiat by default. Payers pay no fees. Merchants pay 0.2%, which is split between the wallet provider and the miners processing the settlement.

Security relies on a 2-of-3 multi-signature arrangement shared among the user, GoMining and a regulated third-party custodian, so the payer retains a key throughout the transaction. Payments are routed through GoMining's private mempool, built on the Stratum V2 mining protocol, which gives them priority within GoMining's own pool.

The protocol launched in May 2026 and opened to third parties in June with its Gen1 SDK and API, allowing merchants, wallet providers and ecosystem partners to integrate it. GoMining says it serves more than 5.5 million users and operates its own mining pool and data center capacity.

About the organizer

Agnic.AI builds identity, authorization and payment infrastructure for AI agents, including a wallet that gives an agent a verifiable identity and a cardholder-signed spending mandate, and completes checkout at merchants without integration on their end. The company implements open standards including AP2, x402 and MCP, and runs the Agentic Commerce Pioneers hackathon series in Toronto.