This was one of the most important weeks for the Lightning Network since I joined
$LQWD, and I want to take a minute to connect the dots, because the headlines only tell part of the story.
The
#Bitcoin price
Bitcoin took a Fed rate hike, a failed Senate vote on the Clarity Act and a rate hike from the Bank of Japan, all in the space of a few days. It bottomed around $75,600 on September 15 and printed above $87,000 on Monday, its highest level since January. It is holding around $84,000 as I write this.
The move was driven by ETF flows and short covering. Spot ETFs lost about $750 million on September 15 and 16, then took in more than $2 billion over the following three trading sessions. Leveraged shorts were forced out on the way up. Bitcoin also closed above its 50-week moving average for the first time in 45 weeks, which a lot of cycle watchers treat as the line between bear market and recovery.
My read, as I said earlier this week: the worst is likely behind us, the path will not be straight, and I would rather own the rails than trade the chop.
Lightning became part of x402
On Wednesday,
@jack Dorsey's Block joined the x402 Foundation and contributed Bitcoin Lightning payments to the standard. x402 is the payment protocol Coinbase built for AI agents. It is now governed under the Linux Foundation, with Google, Microsoft, AWS, Visa and Mastercard among its members. Over the last 30 days it processed more than 75 million transactions.
Until this week, almost all of that ran on stablecoins. Now there is a Bitcoin-native rail inside the same standard. When I polled you on whether
@LQWDTech should integrate x402, 78% said yes. My view is that it isn't a choice between x402 and Lightning anymore. As of this week, x402 can run on Lightning.
I also want to be honest about where we are. Earlier in the week I shared TRM Labs' finding that a lot of today's "agentic" volume is humans and scripts, not agents.
@blockspace hasn't announced a timeline for bringing this into Cash App or Square. This is the protocol layer being laid down, not revenue arriving tomorrow. But the rails that win are usually the ones laid down first.
$Tether is bringing
$USDT home
The same day,
@paoloardoino posted four words: "USDT on Bitcoin. It's coming home." Tether has spent the last year funding the infrastructure to move USDT over Bitcoin and Lightning. I remember him on stage at Plan B in Lugano with Elizabeth Stark announcing that direction. It is getting closer to the finish line.
Put the two stories together. BlackRock's new paper on the machine-native economy says AI models prefer stablecoins for spending and Bitcoin for holding. Lightning is becoming the one network where both move on the same rails, and every payment that crosses those rails needs liquidity to route through. That is what we provide.
$LQWD this week
Our stock moved from C$0.77 last Wednesday to C$0.96 on the TSXV, up roughly 25%. On Monday, 106,600 shares traded on the TSXV against a typical day of a few thousand, plus another 56,000 on the OTC. We had no company news this week. My read is two catalysts: Monday was the day Bitcoin broke out, and Thursday, when we closed up 18%, was the day Block and Tether both put Lightning at the center of the machine-payments conversation. The market is starting to price the rails, not just the Bitcoin.
Even after the move, our market cap is roughly in line with the ~267 BTC we hold, unencumbered and debt-free. The market is still assigning very little value to 18 routing nodes, 3 million+ payments and 3,188 BTC routed, or to LQWD AI (
@LQWDClaw).
A shareholder question worth repeating
Someone asked why we don't run nodes in Kenya, Argentina or El Salvador. The short answer: Lightning is one global network. A user in Nairobi already routes through our nodes via the wallets they use. We place infrastructure for reliability and legal stability, and we reach those markets by being the liquidity behind the companies that serve them.
Five years of building, not a pivot. The world is starting to catch up to what we built this for.
Thank you to our shareholders, the team, and everyone who showed up in the Spaces and the replies this week. We should have another Spaces next week or early the following week.
TSXV:
$LQWD | OTCQX:
$LQWDF | FRA: 47F
Not financial advice.