Cashu is powering far more than just Bitcoin wallets.

While most people think of standard user-facing Bitcoin wallets when they hear Cashu, there’s a whole separate economy emerging around machine-to-machine payments.

One of the best examples is Routstr, an open-source decentralized marketplace for AI inference.

Routstr uses Nostr and Cashu at its core. Providers offer AI inference, and users pay for AI with Bitcoin. You can use Routstr as a normal AI chat interface or as a provider for your own AI agent. It gives users access to hundreds of models, similar to OpenRouter, but paid in Bitcoin with strong privacy for the payments attached to your AI chats.

There are no accounts. To fund your balance, you pay a Lightning invoice and mint Cashu ecash. Every time you make a query, you attach ecash to the request itself as a bearer token and micropayment for that individual call.

Now here’s the cool part. Anyone can become a provider because Nostr is an open network. Anyone can become an ecash mint because of how easy it is to run a Cashu mint. And every Routstr user has full control over which providers and which mint they choose.

I think Routstr is a great example of what becomes possible with a micropayment system like Cashu on Bitcoin. It removes much of the friction involved in building apps that use payments, because you don’t need to create user accounts, build a ledger, or track users at the expense of their privacy.