David Marcus launches Grid Global Accounts with Visa

David Marcus, CEO of Lightspark and former president of PayPal, introduced Grid Global Accounts at Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas. The product is a dollar-denominated payment layer built on Bitcoin that connects to 175 million Visa merchants in 33 countries and reaches 65 nations in real time.

Lightspark will offer Grid Global Accounts to platforms and developers rather than as a standalone consumer app. Companies can embed dollar accounts into their services while Lightspark manages the backend and compliance. Marcus told the audience, “You own the relationship as a platform. We take care of the rest. We stay invisible while helping you build.” He said Lightspark expects coverage to grow to 75 countries and 100 Visa markets before the end of 2026.

Marcus identified four conditions that enabled Grid: regulatory clarity from the GENIUS Act in the U.S. and MiCA in Europe; improved wallet login flows via Google, Apple and passkeys; maturation of Spark, a Bitcoin layer used by major wallets; and wider global issuability of stablecoin-backed cards. Lightspark is joining the Visa network as a principal member, which gives Grid account holders the ability to spend on Visa rails.

In a live demonstration, Marcus showed a fictional creator in Mexico receiving a $5,000 payment from a U.S. platform into a Grid Global Account, spending at Visa merchants worldwide, converting funds to Mexican pesos in real time and sending money to a friend’s Brazilian Pix account in seconds. The account held bitcoin natively alongside dollars and stablecoins under a single wallet address. Marcus described the system: “A dollar in a Grid Global Account is a dollar on any network.” He added that funds can move to USDC on Solana or USDT on Optimism while retaining native Bitcoin support through Spark.

Marcus outlined potential revenue sources for platforms that use Grid, including stablecoin yield, foreign-exchange on-ramps and off-ramps, Visa card interchange and Bitcoin buy-and-sell functions. He also introduced an agent delegation feature that lets AI agents perform scoped financial tasks inside a user’s wallet with defined permissions. In a demo integration with Bread, a Bitcoin wallet launching on the Apple App Store, a WhatsApp-based agent generated a limited-use card for a coffee purchase and sent $500 to a contact in Brazil. Marcus summarized: “The agent plans, the policy decides, and the account enforces.” He closed by addressing industry doubts: “People said for years that you cannot build this on Bitcoin. They were wrong.”