Spiral Says Just 2% of US Adults Spend Crypto, Leaving Bitcoin (BTC) Payments Idle

Spiral Puts the Blame on Demand

Spiral, the Bitcoin (BTC) development team inside Jack Dorsey's Block, published an assessment this week arguing that payments on the network fail on demand rather than technology, a conclusion the team says holds at any Bitcoin price. The framing inside its report is blunt: the stakes are either lasting irrelevance or a long, expected grind, and the window to act is now. The technology side, the team argues, is largely solved. Lightning, a layer built on top of Bitcoin for fast and low-cost transfers, runs in production today, and more than one million US merchants can accept the asset through Square, the payments unit Block operates. Spending has not followed. A Federal Reserve survey of US households found that in 2025, 9% of American adults bought or held crypto as an investment, while only 2% used it to pay for something. The same series has kept the payment share between 1% and 2% every year since 2021. Spiral reads the split as behavioral rather than infrastructural. Holders prefer to save an asset they expect to appreciate, while merchants want to end the day in dollars, so new checkout platforms quietly drop Bitcoin (BTC) from the menu. Two frictions reinforce the loop. Price volatility raises the cost of quoting in BTC, and US tax rules treat every purchase as a taxable sale, a paperwork burden few shoppers or merchants want at the counter. The team draws a hard consequence: if stablecoin rails settle the checkout layer and the emerging AI-agent economy first, holders could be left owning an asset that almost nobody ever spends. Dorsey himself set the benchmark in January 2025, when he said Bitcoin fails if it ends up as digital gold and succeeds only as a currency people can use daily.

Stablecoins Build the Checkout Rails

Into that vacuum, rivals are pouring concrete. Stripe, Shopify and Coinbase are building their new payment rails around stablecoins, and Circle is pitching digital dollars specifically for AI agents. Agent payments show the shift in hard numbers: x402, Coinbase's protocol for machine-to-machine payments, settles about 99% of its transactions in USDC, according to the team's payments research. Spiral's answer is to solicit moonshot ideas from builders, payment providers and funders rather than incremental patches. One proposal would let a user pay in dollars or Bitcoin (BTC) over the same Lightning network, dissolving the merchant-side dollar problem, and Tether is already pulling USDT back onto Bitcoin rails. The dollar-or-Bitcoin idea reverses the usual pitch: instead of asking merchants to accept volatility, it lets them quote in dollars while the network settles underneath. Other drafts include spending incentives for holders and per-use payment streams for creators or AI services, territory that overlaps with the emerging PayFi sector. The reply thread measured the size of the task. One respondent argued that everyday people reject money that can lose value before the rent is due, and called dollar-pegged price stability the only moonshot worth chasing. Real-world behavior points the same way. El Salvador now backs a stablecoin remittance application while holding Bitcoin as a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and the country's shift mirrors the merchant logic Spiral describes: a reserve asset is for holding, while remittances need stable value. Square's merchant count shows acceptance is no longer the constraint either, since a million doors can take the asset and the spending share still sits near zero.

Why the 2% Figure Decides the Race

Read together, the two datasets point at the same conclusion. The Fed's household series is the load-bearing primary record here, and what it captures is a spending share stuck between 1% and 2% for five consecutive years, which is a habit problem rather than a throughput problem; adding Lightning capacity alone will not move it. The 99% USDC share on x402 shows the machine-payment economy defaulting to stablecoins before Bitcoin rails get a turn at all. That leaves the long-running dispute between saving and spending, and the Bitcoin Maximalism position behind it, facing a measurable test. Whichever rails the checkouts and the AI agents adopt first will decide whether Bitcoin stays a reserve asset or becomes the currency its own developers demand.