Spiral, the independent Bitcoin development unit of Block Inc., recently published The Long Road to Bitcoin Payments, raising an important question for Bitcoin: why has everyday Bitcoin payment adoption remained limited despite substantial technological progress?
Spiral proposes four possible moonshots: (1) shared payment rails, (2) payments for people who need them most, (3) new incentives to spend, and (4) entirely new payment experiences.
All four could help, but I believe the discussion misses an important monetary function: commercial credit.
Most Bitcoin payment proposals begin with an existing stock of Bitcoin and ask how to encourage people, companies, and even nation states to acquire and spend it. Yet throughout monetary history, a substantial part of commerce has been financed and enabled by credit instruments that can themselves circulate as money.
This suggests a fifth moonshot.
1. The Missing Monetary Layer
Bitcoin provides scarce, neutral, decentralised base money (M0). Its fixed supply is one of its greatest strengths.
But a fixed monetary base does not imply a fixed quantity of circulating money. Commercial credit can provide an elastic layer of media of exchange (M1), expanding with production and trade and contracting as obligations mature and are discharged.
Businesses routinely need to pay suppliers, workers, and logistics providers before receiving payment for their products. Commercial credit bridges this timing gap. When the resulting claims are transferable and monetised, they can also become media of exchange.
Until very recently, Bitcoin did not have a widely adopted, decentralised mechanism for doing this.
That is not a shortcoming of Bitcoin or its consensus rules, it is the enormous opportunity to build a monetary layer above it: allowing for the missing supply of credit money without changing Bitcoin’s supply or protocol.
This is the economic proposition behind Bitcredit’s dual-layer monetary architecture for Bitcoin.
2. Why Commercial Credit Matters for Payments
Commercial transactions generate payment obligations independently of whether consumers are enthusiastic about spending or hoarding Bitcoin. A producer needs to buy inputs, a trader needs inventory, and workers need to earn wages. These requirements arise from productive economic activity.
Commerce normally involves two transactions: we sell goods or services for media of exchange, and subsequently use that media to purchase other goods and services.
When commercial credit is monetised, it can provide the media of exchange needed to satisfy these obligations. Payments can then move beyond the original transaction: from traders to suppliers, from businesses to workers, and from workers to merchants.
This is what we call the Bitcoin Wage Fund: commercial credit originating in production and trade becomes circulating money that can ultimately finance wages and household expenditure. With it, we earn and spend Bitcoin; without it, we earn fiat funded by bank credit, then we buy Bitcoin, and then we spend it at merchants, only to see them exit to fiat.
With a Bitcoin Wage Fund, the underlying demand arises from fundamental economic activity, without promotional rewards or spending subsidies. The essential question is whether credit money can get acceptance, circulate reliably, and be safely redeemed.
3. Bitcredit: Commercial Credit on Bitcoin
Bitcredit Protocol is an open-source effort to implement this monetary architecture.
Its core instruments are electronic bills of exchange, or e-bills: transferable commercial obligations arising from real trade.
Independent Wildcat mints can monetise eligible, non-fungible e-bills into divisible, privacy-preserving, non-custodial e-cash. Wildcat mints have skin in the game, its fiunctions are supported by verifiable guarantee capital, they are supervised and disciplined by decentralised groups of mints called Clowders.
The protocol introduces a commercial form of proof-of-work: goods sold on trade credit at a Bitcoin price negotiated and agreed between buyer and seller. This real economic transaction provides the basis for monetising the resulting e-bill. Without an eligible underlying commercial transaction, no e-cash can be minted against it.
Commercial proof-of-work is an economic eligibility principle, distinct from Bitcoin’s computational proof-of-work.
E-bills can circulate primarily between businesses through endorsement, while e-cash provides a practical medium of exchange for smaller payments by everyday users. At maturity, the commercial obligation is settled through Bitcoin, extinguishing the corresponding credit.
This creates a distinction between two monetary layers:
Bitcoin (M0): Scarce base money and the ultimate settlement asset for finality.
Commercial credit money (M1): Elastic, transferable media of exchange arising from eligible e-bills.
With Bitcredit Protocol, businesses can expand and contract the supply of credit money. This does not change Bitcoin’s base-money supply, consensus rules, or Bitcoin Core. The technical documentation explains the architecture, while the open-source repositories provide the implementation.
The Bitcredit eBills app and Bitcredit eCash wallet are already available in mainnet beta versions, alongside ongoing development of the decentralised minting infrastructure.
4. From Trade Finance to Everyday Payments
Consider a coffee roaster who buys goods on commercial credit.
Instead of paying immediately in Bitcoin, the roaster signs, accepts, an e-bill payable at a future date. The e-bill holder can then sell it at a discount to someone holding money, or have a Wildcat mint monetise it into spendable e-cash.
That e-cash can be paid to suppliers, service providers, and workers. Recipients can spend it again, allowing the same monetary instruments to support multiple transactions before final redemption. When the commercial obligation matures, settlement in Bitcoin extinguishes the e-bill.
This is no longer merely a theoretical example: Bitcredit is live on Bitcoin mainnet as an MVP. On 16 September 2026, the very first Bitcredit trade-finance transaction involved one export bag of coffee purchased by Otis Bitmeyer’s Sound Coffee from Cherito’s US importer. The buyer issued a 90-day e-bill for 2 million sat, which was subsequently monetised into e-cash for a minting fee of 24,870 sat.
Further coffee and cacao transactions are being initiated to strengthen the system and develop continuous trading corridors. The project’s ambition extends beyond financing individual trades. It is to connect commercial credit creation with recurring payments throughout the economy through a network of independent Wildcat mints.
5. What Would Make This Moonshot Measurable?
We agree with Spiral that adoption progress should be evaluated by actual economic activity rather than wallet downloads, addresses, or speculative volumes.
Our growing commercial activity provides opportunities to measure:
E-bills issued, endorsed, discounted, and redeemed.
E-cash issued, transferred, circulated, and redeemed.
Repeat use by businesses, workers, and merchants.
Payment frequency, circulation velocity, transaction costs, and Bitcoin settlement volumes.
Redemption performance, defaults, and losses given default.
The critical test is whether commercial credit can produce sustained, voluntary payment activity, and unfreeze Bitcoin hodled away in cold wallets.
6. What Still Needs to Be Built
Bitcredit is operational in beta, with real commercial transactions already taking place. Yet building the complete, decentralised credit-money layer presents substantial opportunities for more open-source development and economic innovation.
Among the challenges are liquid secondary markets for e-bills, guarantee-asset infrastructure using technologies such as RGB, credit-risk and liquidity-management tools using AI, and secure, resilient decentralised mint networks.
These challenges extend beyond software engineering into monetary economics, cryptography, commercial law, trade finance, market design, education, and above all, practical adoption by businesses.
This calls for a new kind of orange-pilling.
Unlike just another payment application competing for existing Bitcoin users, this is an opportunity to build an entirely new monetary function on Bitcoin and extend the practical use case of Bitcoin to the vast majority who simply earn and spend everyday money.
The foundations exist now. The Bitcredit applications are running and maturing, and commercial users are transacting. Much of the project’s source code is already open. Some of the most commercially significant components remain to be developed.
For those interested in examining the architecture or contributing to its development:
7. The Fifth Moonshot: Commercial Credit Money
The Bitcredit proposition can be evaluated through the project’s open-source software and observable commercial transactions: whether e-bills and e-cash circulate repeatedly, reach businesses and households, and redeem reliably in Bitcoin.
Building a mature credit-money ecosystem will require liquid markets, robust guarantee mechanisms, sound risk management, secure decentralised infrastructure, and wider understanding of commercial credit among businesses and developers.
Better payment rails are necessary, and all four of Spiral’s moonshots can help. But productive commerce also needs mechanisms to create and circulate the media of exchange that businesses need for liquidity and that people then earn and spend.
We now need that Fifth Moonshot.
About the author:
Hubertus “the Austrian” Hofkirchner is the Founder of Bitcredit Protocol, the credit money layer for Bitcoin, its elastic M1 money. Otherwise he keeps himself busy as a serial entrepreneur, economist, former telecom CEO, and cypherpunk-ish ex-banker.