Spiral admits that bitcoin is losing ground to stablecoins in payments

• "If bitcoin ends up being just digital gold, I think it has failed," says Jack Dorsey.
• Major providers are choosing stablecoins over bitcoin for their payment rails.

The development team at Spiral, backed by entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, published a document in their GitHub repository titled "The Long Road to Bitcoin Payments," where they openly acknowledge that the Lightning Network is losing ground to stablecoins as a means of everyday exchange.

Starting from a warning that Dorsey himself issued in early 2025, stating that "if bitcoin ends up being just digital gold, I think it has failed," the developers analyze a landscape where the transactional adoption of the currency is widely surpassed by dollar-linked assets.

Although the team emphasizes that bitcoin payments today work "better than ever" on a technical level, they explicitly recognize that "the gap is primarily one of demand, not technology."

This deficit of interest in using bitcoin for daily expenses occurs at a critical moment of updating for the financial industry. According to the report, "as major payment providers update their rails, they are choosing stablecoins, not bitcoin."

The corporate preference is evident and spans multiple fronts of emerging innovation. One area of particular concern for Lightning developers is automation.

The document details that artificial intelligence agents "need small and programmable payments, for which Lightning is suitable; however, the first payment tools for agents are being built around stablecoins and cards."

This poses a structural risk to the ecosystem, as the authors emphasize that, "if the initial choices hold, the current absence of bitcoin could be difficult to reverse."

Spiral admits that volatility and regulatory burden work against the daily use of the network. While price fluctuations complicate the setting of commercial value, centralized options "meet the need for stable payments."

The report is emphatic in comparing both technologies from the consumer perspective: "Stablecoins lead in what matters most to people today. Their advantages—stable value, wide acceptance, and policy—are also the areas where bitcoin has made the least progress."

Due to this market dynamic, the team projects sustained dominance of fiat-linked networks in the commercial sector. Their forecast indicates that, "in the short term, stablecoins are likely to channel the majority of dollar payments on the new rails," relegating the decentralized currency to a secondary role of savings.

In response to this competitive challenge, Spiral has issued an open call to find disruptive solutions that can reverse the trend. Among their initial proposals, they suggest creating infrastructures that allow "people to pay in dollars or bitcoin through the same Lightning network."

The long-term goal is to integrate this technology invisibly within traditional software, ensuring that "bitcoin is just a touch away where people already pay," in order to prevent the protocol from being permanently marginalized from mass commerce.

In this regard, as reported by CriptoNoticias last December, USDT, the leading stablecoin in the market, is developing its expansion on the Lightning network. Wallet of Satoshi also provides facilities to use stablecoins on the Lightning network.

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