Lightspark CEO Launches Grid Global Accounts at Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas

David Marcus, CEO of Lightspark and former president of Paypal, took the stage at Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas to announce Grid Global Accounts, a dollar-denominated payment layer built entirely on Bitcoin that connects to 175 million Visa merchants across 33 countries and reaches 65 nations in real time.

Key Takeaways:

• Lightspark CEO David Marcus launched Grid Global Accounts at Bitcoin 2025 Las Vegas, connecting users to 175 million Visa merchants.
• Grid reaches 65 countries in real time, with Marcus targeting 75 countries and 100 Visa markets before year-end 2026.
• Lightspark’s agent delegation feature lets AI spend, send, and schedule payments on users’ behalf inside apps like Bread.

Lightspark Joins Visa Network

Marcus opened his talk with a pointed comparison. “Every day, 400 billion emails are sent, and we have Gmail for that,” he said. “Ten billion payments are sent, about $5.5 trillion. And for that, nothing.” His argument: the infrastructure for money movement has not kept pace with the infrastructure for communication.

The launch centers on a product called the Grid Global Account, a dollar account that Lightspark is making available to platforms and developers rather than operating as a standalone consumer app. Marcus was direct about the intent. “You own the relationship as a platform,” he said. “We take care of the rest. We stay invisible while helping you build.”

Four conditions, Marcus said, made the product possible now. Regulatory clarity arrived through the GENIUS Act in the United States and MiCA in Europe. Wallet login flows improved through Google, Apple, and passkey integrations. Spark, a Bitcoin layer where many prominent bitcoin wallets are building, matured enough to support stablecoins. And stablecoin-backed cards became globally issuable over the past 12 to 18 months.

The centerpiece announcement was a partnership with Visa. Lightspark is becoming a principal member of the Visa network, giving Grid account holders access to spending at any of the 175 million merchants on Visa’s global rails. Marcus said coverage will expand from 33 countries to 100 before the end of the year.

Image source: Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas. Marcus demonstrated the account through a character named Barbara, a creator in Mexico receiving a $5,000 payment from a U.S. platform. In the demonstration, she spent at Visa merchants globally, converted funds to Mexican pesos in real time, and sent money to a friend’s Brazilian Pix account in seconds. The same account also held bitcoin natively alongside dollars and stablecoins, all under a single wallet address.

The interoperability extends across networks. “A dollar in a Grid Global Account is a dollar on any network,” Marcus said. It can move to USDC on Solana or to USDT on Optimism, and because Grid runs on Spark, Bitcoin support is built in from the start.

For platforms, Marcus framed every payment feature as a revenue source. Stablecoin yield, foreign exchange on-ramps and off-ramps, Visa card interchange, and Bitcoin buy-and-sell functions each represent income that platforms currently hand off to correspondent banks and payment intermediaries.

Marcus also introduced agent delegation, a feature that lets AI agents execute financial tasks inside a user’s wallet with defined permissions. He demonstrated an integration with Bread, a bitcoin wallet launching in the Apple App Store. Through a Whatsapp-based agent, he showed the system generating a scoped card to buy coffee and sending $500 to a contact in Brazil.

“The agent plans, the policy decides, and the account enforces,” Marcus said. “The user always stays in control.” He closed with a direct answer to a long-running skepticism in the industry. “People said for years that you cannot build this on Bitcoin,” Marcus said. “They were wrong.”