From Human Application to Intelligent Collaboration: How GOAT Network Builds the Next Generation Digital Economy

We are witnessing a fundamental change in how the economy is organized.

The knowledge barrier is rapidly being erased. Tasks that previously required collaboration among engineers, lawyers, and accounting teams can now be completed by a single person using the right tools to build prototypes and continuously iterate on their ideas.

A new role is emerging—"Super Individual." One person, in collaboration with multiple agents, can accomplish the scale of work that once required a small company.

In this new era, agents are no longer just tools; they are becoming the main executors of economic activities. Humans are gradually shifting to being the proposers of demands and verifiers of results, while the execution layer, including analysis, negotiation, transactions, and delivery, will be completed by agents at machine speed.

As capabilities continue to enhance and autonomy increases, agents will increasingly participate in real economic activities, rather than merely remaining at the experimental or demonstration level.

Change Has Happened, But Infrastructure Is Not Ready

If you observe the current on-chain world, you will find that an important change has occurred.

Agents have begun to participate in transactions, manage assets, execute complex workflows, and collaborate with other agents to accomplish tasks that are difficult for a single entity to complete. These behaviors are still in the early stages, but they are gradually transitioning from "experimentation" to "real economic behavior."

However, none of this can be scaled yet.

The reason is not due to insufficient agent capabilities, but rather the lack of infrastructure.

For agents to truly become core participants in the economy, they need a complete set of new infrastructure: the ability to discover each other across protocols and chains, establish trust without centralized intermediaries, and collaborate and transact efficiently and securely.

But the reality is that these capabilities are not yet mature. Standards are just beginning to form, tools are still in the early stages, and best practices are still being explored.

This is the biggest gap we currently face, and it is the problem we are working to solve.

Why Bitcoin?

In “Agent Standard”, we propose a core judgment: just as humans need a currency free from political interference, machines also need a monetary system that does not rely on human intermediaries.

Agents cannot open bank accounts, cannot sign legal contracts, and cannot interact with manual processes in traditional financial systems. For them, what truly matters is not "financial services," but rather more fundamental capabilities: certainty, finality, and availability around the clock.

These are often seen as marginal features in traditional financial systems, but for automated systems, they are infrastructure-level requirements.

Relevant experimental data also corroborate this trend: a study initiated by the btc-42">Bitcoin Policy Institute tested the decisions of 36 cutting-edge AI models in 9,072 controlled scenarios. The results showed that among all currency options, Bitcoin was chosen as the preferred currency 48.3% of the time, ranking first.

In more specific "store of value" scenarios, this preference is further reinforced: 79.1% of the models chose Bitcoin. In all tests, no model selected fiat currency as its overall preference.

Notably, the stronger the model's capabilities, the more pronounced the preference for Bitcoin. For example, in the Claude Opus 4.5 model, this ratio reached 91%. Meanwhile, this preference remained highly stable under different experimental conditions, with an overall fluctuation of only 0.6%.

These results point to a clear trend: as AI agents gradually gain control over assets and economic autonomy, they will naturally tend to choose Bitcoin as their value foundation.

But Bitcoin alone is not enough; although Bitcoin has the strongest security and the most reliable monetary attributes, it is not an execution environment.

What agents need is lower costs, higher throughput, stronger programmability, and cross-entity collaboration capabilities. These capabilities cannot be directly realized on the Bitcoin main chain.

This is precisely the purpose of Bitcoin-secured Layer 2 networks: to inherit Bitcoin's security while providing execution capabilities for the agent economy.

Why "Digital Economy" Instead of "Agent Economy"?

We deliberately use "Digital Economy" instead of "Agentic Economy."

Because "Agent" is just a part of a larger category. The essence of agents is the digital processing of information, value transfer, and programmatic collaboration.

The real change that is happening is not merely the "emergence of agents," but rather the formation of a broader digital economy. In this system, humans, institutions, and agents will participate together, interacting through programmable systems.

In this new economic structure:

• Interactions are programmatic

• Value is composable

• Trust is verifiable

The problem we face is not a single short-term narrative, but a set of long-standing, foundational issues that span different participating entities.

GOAT Network: Bitcoin-Secured Infrastructure for the Digital Economy

In this context, the positioning of GOAT Network is very clear.

It is a Layer 2 network aimed at the digital economy, secured by Bitcoin, serving individuals, institutions, and agents.

Unlike most solutions that rely on "Ethereum security" or "committee security," GOAT Network chose Bitcoin as the sole security anchor from the beginning. This means it inherits Bitcoin-level finality and long-term trustworthiness.

Architecturally, GOAT Network is divided into two key layers.

First Layer: Settlement Layer

At the lowest level, GOAT provides Bitcoin-secured settlement capabilities.

This layer does not pursue complex functions but ensures that all value transfers can ultimately anchor on the most reliable settlement foundation. This design gives the entire system stronger stability and credibility over the long term.

Second Layer: Agent Infrastructure

Above the settlement layer, we have built a complete middleware system for agents, enabling them to truly participate in economic activities.

ClawUp provides the launch capability for agents, allowing developers to deploy with very low barriers; from an idea to a runnable agent can take just a few minutes.

ERC-8004 addresses identity and reputation issues. In an economy involving agents, "Who am I?" and "Am I trustworthy?" become foundational questions. Through cross-chain identity, accumulative reputation, and verifiable credentials, agents can gradually establish their trust foundation.

x402 is the key to the payment layer. In the agent economy, payments cannot rely on invoices or manual approvals; they must be instant, automatic, and cross-chain. Through HTTP native payments and machine-level micropayment mechanisms, agents can complete value exchanges without human involvement.

AgentKit provides developers with a unified toolkit that integrates wallet management, asset operations, identity registration, and payment capabilities, significantly simplifying the building process.

Currently, we have completed a full set of infrastructure, including GOAT L2 (based on BitVM2), decentralized sequencer, ERC-8004, x402, AgentKit, and ClawUp.

On this basis, we are continuing to advance: a more complete reputation system, a more efficient agent discovery mechanism, multi-agent collaboration protocols, and broader payment ecosystem compatibility.

Our Goal

We hope to promote the emergence of a new construction paradigm.

One person can use agents to accomplish tasks that previously required a team; the building threshold has been greatly lowered; more developers can participate and jointly promote the development of the agent economy.

This is not a short-term technological trend, but a reconstruction of economic structure.

We are entering a new era: value will be executed by machines, rules will be defined by code, and trust will be verified by systems.

And all of this is just the beginning.

Bitcoin security, Layer 2 speed, agent-native infrastructure—this is GOAT Network.

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