Spiral was built to build open alternatives: open-source money, open-source tools, and new ways to openly fund contributors to both. When Spiral was founded back in 2019, this applied mostly to bitcoin. It still does.
But the fight we've always picked (open over closed, yours over theirs) is now happening in AI too. The battle for your money is nothing new, but the battle for your intelligence has just begun.
We see bitcoin as programmable, global, and permissionless. This makes it the perfect economic layer for a world where AI agents seamlessly pay each other and creators earn across borders without middlemen.
That world needs open money, but it needs open intelligence to go with it, because the same institutions that control the former have already drawn up plans for your data, models, and dependence on their servers. This, in a word, sucks.
We were founded as a non-profit R&D lab within Block to give back to the bitcoin community. We've gone about this in a few major ways that we're now applying to AI:
Our projects power wallets and applications used by millions of people who have no idea that they exist. Now we're building out in the open for AI too, bringing security, privacy, and decentralization to how it runs and is made. The frontier is new but our vitamin D deficiencies are roughly the same.
Our grant program has given hundreds of grants to dozens of people and projects who build things that matter. We give grants to developers, designers, PMs, and researchers who are pushing all of this toward inevitable, inescapable global ubiquity.
Trying new stuff that raises new questions. What happens when bitcoin meets AI? They're the two most exciting technologies in recent memory, and as it happens, even autonomous agents need money. So we're working out the primitives for machine-to-machine commerce, agentic payments, and a frankly unknowable number of economic structures that don't exist yet.
For good reason, a lot of people are nervous about where AI is going. We want to be the antidote to that.