GOAT Network signed an MOU with KOSDAQ-listed Square Tech to bring agent payments to South Korea, the BitVM3 bug bounty published its final results, and the paper behind the bridge's proofs went up on the IACR archive. Plus CEO Kevin Liu’s KBW talk in full, NIST's end date for elliptic curves, the end of the Stargate sunset, and more.
The Square Tech MOU
October brought our biggest step yet toward real-world agent payments. On the 22nd we announced a memorandum of understanding with KOSDAQ-listed Square Tech to explore AI agent-powered stablecoin payments in South Korea, with DAC Labs, the engineering company behind our core infrastructure, joining to provide technical support.
The first program in scope is one Square Tech is developing with Lordsystem, a Korean mobile identity company: foreign tourists verify their identity with a mobile passport and pay participating shops in US dollar stablecoins. The MOU's first priority is integrating our agent payment technology into that program, with digital gift card and voucher purchases under evaluation as a next step, and Korean won stablecoins prepared for as the country's framework develops.
The partnership announcement was covered by Bitcoin Magazine.
Square Tech will lead business development, merchant partnerships and regulatory engagement in Korea, while GOAT Network provides the agent payment technology and network infrastructure. DAC Labs supports technical integration, security reviews and network operations. Every agent in the system carries a verifiable onchain identity under ERC-8004, with spending limits, user authorization and complete transaction records, and the rollout is phased and subject to Korean legal and regulatory review.
CEO Kevin Liu, from the release: "For agentic commerce to scale, businesses need to make their products and services accessible to AI agents, while consumers need assurance that purchases are authorized, spending stays within defined limits, and payments are secure."
The announcement went out through Bitcoin Magazine and was carried by Business Insider, Investing.com, TradingView, Benzinga and others. It also landed where the work will happen: in Korea, Herald Economy and TokenPost covered the agreement, in Korean and in English.
Kevin Liu at KBW, published in full
Last month we promised Kevin's Stable Stage talk in full, and it's out. Your Next Customer Is an AI Agent covers how agents decide what to buy, why most merchants are still invisible to them, and what to change before that customer shows up - the full video is on our YouTube channel.
GOAT Network CEO Kevin Liu on stage at KBW
Two interviews joined it. Kevin sat down with Biteye on the road from 160 million app downloads to Bitcoin infrastructure, and why "Bitcoin Layer 2" was never enough on its own. And COO Sophia Li's conversation with Genzio - what agentic commerce actually is, why today's web shuts agents out, and where Bitcoin security fits - is also on YouTube, along with her answer to what comes next: closer work with key partners in specific use cases, and a marketplace of products and services ready for agents to buy.
The BitVM3 bug bounty: final results
The GOAT BitVM3 Bug Bounty closed out in October. The final batch classified 37 findings and awarded three: a High for a timelock configuration validation gap on the challenge path, a Medium for missing resource limits in the node's peer-to-peer message handling, and a Low for a witness validation gap spanning the node and the L2 contracts.
Across the full program, that makes 123 classified findings and 16 awards: 5 High, 6 Medium, 5 Low. Rewards for all awarded findings are being distributed together, fixes are being implemented with several already closed, and full details land in the public repositories once the fixes do. Sixteen confirmed issues found and fixed before the bridge carries mainnet BTC is precisely what the program was for.
The paper behind the proof system
Ziren, the zkVM that proves every exit from the GOAT BitVM3 bridge, now has a published paper: Ziren: Succinct Arguments for MIPS32 Execution, on the IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive. It documents a production zkVM that has proved Ethereum mainnet blocks end to end, puts numbers on its security - more than 100 bits of interactive soundness per proof stage - and backs the design with 104 determinism theorems machine-checked in Lean 4. On throughput, proving reaches 12.0 MHz on a single RTX 5090 and 75.8 MHz on eight.
For anyone who wants the substance without the cryptography, ZKM published a plain-language walkthrough of the paper, and followed it with What are zero-knowledge proofs for? - what ZK makes possible well beyond crypto, and how a zkVM opens proving to any program. The next major Ziren upgrade is to throughput, which carries straight through to proving cost and latency.
Post-quantum: the world set dates
In October the outside world put dates on the quantum problem. Europol's European Cybercrime Centre published its report on quantum computing and cryptocurrencies. Ethereum researcher Justin Drake called on the industry to begin planning migrations to quantum-safe addresses. And NIST finalized its transition report, IR 8547: elliptic-curve signatures deprecated after 2030 and disallowed after 2035. That schedule doesn't govern Bitcoin, but the math being retired is the math behind secp256k1, the curve Bitcoin and its layer 2s run on.
None of it changed our plan, because the plan was already public: the map published in September names every exposed surface and who owns each fix, and the first migration on it - validator consensus keys, from secp256k1 to ML-DSA-65 - was built and measured before NIST set its dates.
First principles, on the record
Late in the month we published How Commerce Inherits Bitcoin Security: the core GOAT Network thesis explained from first principles.
The most secure network ever built does one job, while the world's commerce runs on systems that ask for trust - and it shows how a rollup lets commerce inherit the security rather than borrow the brand. If someone asks you what GOAT Network actually is, this is the piece to send.
For merchants and builders
How to Start Selling to AI Agents - In Pictures turns the merchant guide into screenshots: every screen between registering and your first payment - from people, by card or crypto, or from AI agents - so you can see the whole path before you start it. Or watch the full GOAT Flow demo to get set up.
And GOAT Flow now explains itself in sixty seconds. The GOAT ELI5 series launched with two animated episodes: What is GOAT Flow?, told through a tea shop taking its first order from an agent, and a second on agent identity and reputation - why you can name your agent at gns.goat.network and let its stamped receipts build a track record.
For teams building agent products on GOAT Network rails: Metis is running monthly builder rewards, and AgentKit, GOAT Flow, x402 and identity integrations all qualify under the dual-chain rules, with execution on Metis Andromeda.
The Stargate sunset, completed
The Stargate wind-down finished this month. Stargate support for GOAT Network ended on October 23rd - Stargate-issued USDC.e, USDT and WETH balances still show in wallets, but the window to redeem them through Stargate has closed. And on October 30th, LayerZero's default DVN and Executor stopped serving GOAT Network: the replacement DVNs and Executor, live since September, are now the only path for OApps and OFTs that bridge to or from GOAT Network. If the date caught you out - as a builder, or holding BTCB or DOGEB bridged onward through a third-party adapter - the notice has the configuration and the team is in Discord. Everyone else is unaffected.
New channels
We’ve spent the past few weeks quietly setting GOAT Network up on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Medium, alongside the new YouTube channel. The blog and this newsletter stay the long-form home. If one of those is where you already spend your time, follow us there - we’re posting to all of them from here on.
Coming up
The next Ziren release, built around performance. Integration work on the Square Tech tourist program, with milestones reported as they land. The gift card platform expansion, now in final testing. And much more in preparation for 2027.
