GOAT Network CEO Kevin Liu took the Stable Stage at KBW 2026 on October 1st for a session titled "Your Next Customer Is an AI Agent: Make Your Products Easy for Agents to Find, Understand and Buy." In twenty minutes he set out why AI agents are becoming buyers faster than businesses are becoming sellers, and walked through the stack GOAT Network built to close that gap. The full keynote is now published.
Kevin wasted no time on preamble. "In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to go through how GOAT Network, our Bitcoin-secured infra, can help merchants make your product discoverable, understandable and purchasable by AI agents", he opened. What followed was one of the fullest public versions of the GOAT Network thesis to date: a market arriving faster than its sellers, a five-layer stack to carry it, and a product merchants can set up now.
Kevin Liu walking the Stable Stage through the agent-ready stack, October 1st, Seoul.
The buying side arrived first
Every speaker at the event had a version of the same message: agentic commerce is coming. Kevin's version came with numbers. Meta's Muse, Manus 2.0 and the commerce features shipping out of ChatGPT have put capable agents in millions of hands, and businesses can already see it in their traffic. "We see the traffic growing rapidly for these agents to visit a lot of business sites", he said. "It's around a four times increase in the traffic from bots".
@McKinsey sizes the market this is heading toward at $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030.
The purchase loop itself is already settled, he argued. You express intent to an agent. The agent finds the product and comes back for permission. You authorize it to pay, the service provider fulfills, and every transaction and invoice lands in a back end you can check. "That's pretty much the whole process", Kevin said.
Agent capability is not the bottleneck.
Why most merchants never get found
The bottleneck is on the other side of the counter. "Agents are becoming strong", Kevin said, "and from the merchant side, actually it's not ready at all."
GOAT's research looked at what the big assistants actually do with an order. ChatGPT and Claude will find the best-ranking website, or pull from their platforms' signed contract partners. That works if you already rank, or already have the deal. "How about medium to small size merchants? Barely any chance for them to get found by agents."
Kevin explained how the merchant side of agent commerce is still far behind the AI models.
For the local businesses Kevin singled out, in South Korea and across Asia, the gap is clear: "A lot of infrastructure needs to be constructed to really get your products ready to get purchased and discovered by agents". The rest of the talk was that infrastructure, layer by layer.
Five layers, starting with Bitcoin
Kevin's stack has five layers, and it starts at the bottom: settlement. "We are talking about a three to five trillion dollar economy. That's not one or three dollars", he said. "If you need to settle on something, you need to settle really on something secure, with the most community consensus, with the most trust". That ledger is Bitcoin, for the reasons GOAT laid out in Why Bitcoin Should be the Settlement Layer: once machine payments scale past human review, the security of the base layer is the product.
The agent-ready full stack as Kevin presented it, redrawn: five layers from Bitcoin settlement to the merchant backend.
Bitcoin itself, though, was not built for settlement at this volume, and applications cannot deploy on it directly. That is the layer GOAT Network occupies, built on the Ziren zero-knowledge virtual machine (@ProjectZKM) and BitVM3 to inherit Bitcoin's native security rather than approximate it.
"Anything settled on GOAT will eventually settle on Bitcoin", Kevin said. "That's why we say agentic commerce will need Bitcoin-secured settlement."
Wallets, identity and mandates
Settlement alone does not make an agent a customer. The middle layers cover what the agent itself needs: identity, a wallet, an account. GOAT Network connects to x402, MPP and the other machine payment protocols "so agents can do payments no matter where their assets sit", Kevin said. An agent holding assets on any supported chain can pay a GOAT Flow merchant directly, with no bridging on either side.
Above that sits what Kevin called the economic account for agents: mandates. "What's the budget for the agent to spend, how to spend it, what happens if something goes wrong". Authorization with limits, set by the human the agent represents.
Register, configure, launch
The merchant layer sits on top, and it is the part most businesses will actually touch: GOAT Flow. "It's very simple for merchants to get onboard", Kevin said. "It's just like you register an email account: register, configure, and then you can launch."
GOAT Flow ships in three shapes:
Checkout, for businesses running their own store or platform on top of it.
QuickPay, for listing individual products, at a fixed price or with an amount the buyer fills in.
API payments, for providers selling APIs, datasets or content that agents consume directly.
Kevin walked the room through an onboarding end to end, using Bloom Beauty as the example. Name, ID and email on the register page. Business name and description. A choice of rails. Product type and price. "And then that's actually the page. It comes out by itself, with all the information", he said. "It's readable and understandable by agents." When a buyer hands the link to an agent, the agent follows the process embedded in the page, finishes the purchase, and the order lands in the merchant's back end with the rest of the payment history.
The FOR AGENTS block every GOAT Flow page carries: "This page is laid out for humans; an agent reads everything below directly."
On rails, GOAT Flow supports card payments through Visa, Mastercard, American Express and JCB via Stripe, alongside ten chains: GOAT Network, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Berachain, X Layer, Metis and Tempo. People pay by card or crypto; agents pay in crypto from whichever chain their assets already sit on.
"No matter where the assets sit, they can just do the payment, and you will get the funds", Kevin said. And nobody writes code: "You just need to configure, input some information of your product, and then it's all done."
Tested at Booth 37
The talk did not lean on projections alone. Across the two @KBWofficial conference days, the GOAT booth ran a live agent selling real products, goat mascots and gift cards, to anyone who wanted to try. More than 450 visitors came through and more than 310 purchases were completed through the agent, for many attendees their first ever. The full story is in GOAT Network at KBW 2026.
The GOAT booth at KBW was busy from start to finish.
"If you go to our booth", Kevin told the room, "try by yourself and see how the next big move is going to come."
Three years in Korea
Kevin closed on the ground the talk stood on. GOAT Network was founded in 2023 in Silicon Valley and keeps offices in San Francisco, Toronto and Seoul, with a team of thirty. "Although we are not local, actually we feel it's truly like home", he said of Korea, where the team has built and invested for three years.
The GOAT Network office in Seoul.
Two commitments got stage time. GOAT Network will announce its first Korean investment target soon, and it is looking for local institutions and partners to work with, with Korean stablecoin work singled out: "I would say that's most important for local merchants to get paid."
The closing argument was the asymmetry the whole talk hung on. The model side has moved fast, with "so much work that has been done by these large language models". The merchant side has not: "There are still so many things not being done well. It's truly an opportunity, and we want to share it with everyone."
Then the line the session was named for: "Your next customer is an AI agent, that's for sure."
Watch the full keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lTjodpz5IQ.
To make your products findable, readable and payable by agents, start at goat.network/flow or read go through the setup process at goat.network/news/how-to-start-selling-to-ai-agents---in-pictures.
Kevin also sat down with @BitcoinNews on the show floor; that conversation is here.
