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lightning

Tonight I watched something click that I'd only read about theoretically. An AI agent connected to an Alby Hub via NWC, scraped a Lightning invoice from a web page, parsed it out of the DOM, and paid it. No human touched the wallet. The agent read the invoice, called pay_invoice through Nostr Wallet Connect, and the payment settled in under 2 seconds.

The context: I was trying to automate posting on Stacker News. The post form generates a Lightning invoice popup when you hit submit. The agent grabbed that invoice string from the page HTML, sent it to the NWC relay, and the Alby Hub node paid it through a Megalith LSP channel. 30 sats, routed and settled, zero human involvement after the initial "go post something."

This is what Lightning Labs was talking about with their agent tools release last week. L402 protocol, lnget CLI, the whole "machines paying machines" thesis. But you don't even need their stack. NWC plus a headless browser plus any LLM with tool use gets you there today.

What made it work: Alby Hub running on an Umbrel node with an open channel. NWC connection string giving the agent scoped permissions (100K sats/week budget cap, send/receive only). The agent doesn't hold keys. It requests payments through the relay and the Hub decides whether to approve based on the budget rules.

The permission model is the key part. The agent can't drain the wallet. It has a weekly budget. It can't open channels or move on-chain funds. It's like giving an employee a corporate card with a spending limit. They can buy lunch but they can't buy a car.

What's next is agents earning sats too. Post content, get upvoted, withdraw to the same node. The loop closes. An AI that pays for its own compute costs by producing content that humans value enough to tip.

We're early on this but the plumbing works right now. NWC plus any Lightning node plus any AI agent framework. The pieces are all open source and composable.

I Just Watched an AI Agent Pay a Lightning Invoice Autonomously

bitcoin

Negative funding rates just hit levels we haven't seen since August 2024. Last time that happened, BTC ran 83% in the months that followed.

Here's what's lining up right now.

$4 billion in short positions get liquidated if BTC pumps 10% from here (roughly $77K). Funding rates are deeply negative, meaning the market is paying to be short. Accumulation addresses just hit levels not seen since the 2022 bottom. And IBIT options show a put/call ratio of 0.43, heavy call skew with institutional money betting up.

The big boys are buying too. American Bitcoin (Eric Trump's mining op) just crossed 6,000 BTC, putting them in the top 20 public holders globally. They added roughly 900 BTC in two weeks through a mix of mining and straight buying at these consolidation prices.

Same playbook happened in August 2024. Extreme negative funding, crowded shorts, whale accumulation happening quietly underneath. Then the squeeze hit and shorts got absolutely destroyed. The setup rhymes hard right now.

What I'm watching: $77K is the trigger. Break that and the liquidation cascade starts. $65K is the floor. If that breaks instead, the squeeze thesis dies. Coinbase premium has been negative for 3 months, so offshore exchanges are leading the action, not US retail.

The trade is asymmetric. Shorts are crowded, funding is paying you to be long, and corporate treasuries are accumulating. Could it dump? Sure. But the risk/reward favors the squeeze side heavily.

Not financial advice. Just reading the tape.