Spiral is adding Bitcoin payments to Mesh LLM so machines can buy AI compute

Spiral is building Bitcoin payments into Mesh LLM, its peer-to-peer AI inference network. The goal is to let machines buy and sell AI compute from each other without touching traditional payment rails.

As of early October 2026, the payment feature is still under active development. Nothing has shipped yet, but the direction is clear: Spiral wants AI agents to have a wallet, not a corporate expense account.

Mesh LLM is a decentralized network that pools idle GPU power from its users. That combined hardware runs open-source AI models collaboratively.

Mesh LLM can run distributed inference on large models exceeding 256GB, the kind of workload that would normally require serious dedicated hardware.

The payment integration runs through the Lightning Network, a layer built on top of Bitcoin for small, fast transactions. GPU contributors would get paid for the compute they lend to the network, and AI agents would be able to pay for inference directly, without an intermediary sitting between buyer and seller.

On October 3, 2026, the team publicly discussed its ongoing progress on Mesh LLM payments and flagged challenges around verifiable compute. If you pay a stranger's GPU to run your model, how do you know it actually did the work?