Square, the payment platform owned by Jack Dorsey’s company Block (XYZ) is earning a yield of 9.7% on its bitcoin holdings through running a node on the Lightning network.

Block’s Bitcoin product lead Miles Suter said that the firm is earning «real bitcoin returns from our corporate holdings…by efficiently routing real payments across the Lightning network,» in an appearance at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

The yield is earned through Square’s Lightning service provider c=, which was created two years ago to improve liquidity and efficiency on Lightning.

Lightning Labs’ Ryan Gentry referred to Suter’s announcement as «the biggest news» at Bitcoin 2025 in a post on X, estimating that Square’s 9.7% yield equates to around $1 million a year.

For many years, bitcoin layer-2 network Lightning was hailed as the savior to BTC’s problems of scale and speed by creating micropayment channels that can process transactions away from the main blockchain.

Over time though some of these hopes have faded owing to Lightning’s faults, such as the requirement for inbound liquidity, whereby users must in effect commit BTC in order to receive BTC. This may deter adoption by smaller-scale nodes, which is a hindrance to decentralization.

However, Square sees the layer-2 as fundamental to its plans to accelerate BTC payments adoption, with one in four of its outbound bitcoin payments now processed on Lightning, Suter said onstage in Las Vegas.

The company is piloting Lightning-based payments at Bitcoin 2025 with plans for a rollout to all eligible Square sellers in 2026.

«When you enable real payments by making the. faster and more convenient, the network gets stronger, smarter and more useful,» Suter said.

«So if you’re wondering if wondering if bitcoin is still just an asset, the answer is no. It’s already an asset and a protocol and now Block is leading the effort to make it the world’s best payment system.»

A decade ago, Bitcoin felt like the internet in the early ‘90s—niche, experimental, and easy to dismiss. Today? It’s front and center on Capitol Hill.

What began as a decentralized outlier many labeled as fringe is slowly becoming a pillar of America’s economy that many consider the future. People can now invest in Bitcoin through their 401(k)s, IRAs, and brokerage accounts. This year, the U.S. created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Roundtables and summits are being hosted at the White House, and pro-Bitcoin positions are showing up in campaign platforms.

That shift wasn’t accidental. Bitcoin gained momentum because its core values—open access, transparency, and distributed control—offered an alternative when public trust in traditional finance was eroding.

A similar pattern is unfolding today with artificial intelligence.

AI Has a Trust Problem

AI is booming, but so are questions about who controls it. If you’re wondering where your data is going when you use a chatbot, who benefits from it, and why you have to surrender your privacy in the first place, you’re not alone.

According to a new Harris poll commissioned by DCG, 74% of U.S. respondents believe AI would benefit more people if it weren’t controlled by just a few big companies and 65% don’t trust elected officials to steer AI’s development. The public loves the potential of AI; they just don’t trust the players in charge.

That trust gap isn’t new, and Bitcoin confronted it head-on with decentralization: when trust in institutions erodes, the answer isn’t more gatekeepers—it’s building systems that don’t require them. Decentralized technologies rebuild trust by removing human intermediaries, who are often prone to bias, error, or self-interest, and eliminating single points of control. By replacing these flawed gatekeepers with transparent, distributed systems, decentralization offers a more reliable and accountable foundation for trust and confidence, rooted in transparency, resilience, and user-aligned governance.

This shift—from human-controlled to technologically decentralized systems—is what makes trust possible again.

Decentralized AI: The Internet of Intelligence

Unlike Big Tech models controlled by centralized entities, decentralized AI (deAI) is built, trained, and operated across a distributed network, preventing any single party from controlling the system. Decentralized AI (deAI) flips the script on traditional AI by putting power in the hands of users, not corporations. Networks like Bittensor (see Note below) are leading the way by enabling open, permissionless access to AI infrastructure where anyone can contribute models, computing power, or data. This approach levels the playing field for students, startups, and independent developers who would otherwise be shut out of today’s centralized AI giants.

Instead of gatekeepers, Bittensor coordinates contributions transparently across a global network, using blockchain to embed trust and reward real value. The result is AI that’s more open, resilient, and fair, where incentives are based on merit, not monopolies.

Voters Are Ahead of Lawmakers on Decentralized AI

While Americans are still in the earlier stage of learning about AI technologies, they can already intuitively anticipate the advantages of decentralized AI.

The Harris poll of 2,000 US adults found:

• 75% say decentralized AI better supports innovation
• 71% say it’s more secure for personal data

Three out of four respondents say decentralized AI drives more innovation than closed AI, and 71% believe it offers stronger protection for personal data. What’s missing for consumers using AI is transparency and control, and they want to know they’re not just training someone else’s profit engine.

Policy Can’t Ignore Infrastructure and Ownership

Even with strong public support, the promise of decentralized AI depends on whether policymakers understand a simple fact: the structure of a system determines its behavior and outcomes.However, the regulatory conversation around AI is still catching up, and in many cases, seems to be missing a crucial point. We’re seeing big debates around safety and existential risk, but almost no airtime for how the foundational structure of these systems impacts trust. A centralized model run by a few powerful players is inherently vulnerable, opaque, and exclusionary and will ultimately erode trust. To encourage trust, technological adoption and innovation, policymakers should:

• Incentivize innovation in open ecosystems
• Ensure people can benefit from their data
• Avoid enshrining Big Tech dominance through regulation

The same gatekeepers who shaped today’s AI shouldn’t control its future, especially with the public calling for real alternatives. The current Administration has taken a refreshingly pragmatic approach to AI, prioritizing innovation and American competitiveness over heavy-handed regulation and we hope Congress will do the same. Emphasizing private sector innovation and decentralized development lays the groundwork for a more open and resilient AI future.

It’s Not Fringe. It’s the Future

Decentralized AI is a forward-looking solution to one of the most urgent challenges of our time: how to ensure AI serves the public, not just the powerful. Just as Bitcoin moved from the margins to the mainstream, decentralized AI is quickly becoming the foundation for a more open, secure, and competitive AI ecosystem.

The public gets it. Now policymakers must catch up. The choice is clear: protect open networks, reward real builders, and defend the freedom to innovate—or hand the future of intelligence to a few corporate gatekeepers.

Decentralized AI isn’t fringe. It’s the foundation for a freer, fairer digital future. Let’s not miss the moment.

Note: DCG owns $TAO, the native token of the Bittensor network, and may hold interests in projects built on or supporting Bittensor and other deAI ecosystems.

Tether’s USDT token and the Tron blockchain network dominate the rapidly growing stablecoin payment industry, according analytics firm Artemis with help from investment firms Dragonfly and Castle Island Ventures.

A report entitled “Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up” looked at data from 31 stablecoin payment companies, and found USDT, the largest stablecoin, accounted for 90 percent of payment transaction volume, followed by Circle’s USDC, the second-largest. Tron was the preferred settlement network, hosting around 60 percent of volume, followed by Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon.

The snapshot of stablecoin payment volume taken in February added up to an annualized $72.3 billion, covering various payment types and sectors (B2B, P2P, B2C, Card, and Lending).

Stablecoins, predominantly U.S. dollar-pegged digital tokens, were originally used to conveniently park money while trading cryptocurrencies. But these low-cost, instantly-settled financial instruments are now eating payments across the board, with bullish estimates on the potential size of that market coming from both crypto native firms and major banks.

It’s perhaps surprising that the share of Circle’s USDC isn’t larger, given the firm’s involvement in payments and recent plans to introduce a dedicated cross-border payments network.

In addition, Circle, which this week filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, has been taking market share from Tether in terms of issuance, so the expectation might have been a similar or pro-rata level when it comes to payments volume, said Dragonfly general partner Rob Hadick.

“For the 31 providers we got data from at least, it’s clear that’s not the case for the payments use case,” Hadick said in an interview. “In fact, a higher portion of the volume, relative to the issuance, is happening with Tether, and it’s happening primarily on Tron and then Ethereum. This was quite surprising to us.”

This perspective is partly shaped by the fact that a lot of business-to-business uses, such as paying suppliers for global supply chains, is happening from emerging markets to the U.S. or from the U.S. to emerging markets. In some of those markets, places like Argentina or Brazil, for instance, people might be worried about things like bank failures, and Tether is seen as a trusted brand, Hadick said.

Moreover, firms that use stablecoins for payments have little concern about which blockchain is being used to settle on. Tron is fast and cheap and there’s over $60 billion of USDT on the chain, so it simply makes sense, he added.

“If you go to Argentina or Brazil, people don’t say they want to use stablecoins, they say we use Tether,” Hadick said. “Tether is the brand that is ubiquitous with USD access, in the same way that in the U.S. Uber is ubiquitous with taking a car that you call from your phone.”