Self-Custody for You and Your AI | Roland Bewick

About this episode

Roland Bewick discusses the transition to self-custody in Bitcoin and the development of AI agents that manage their own finances.

“With 12 words, you can travel the world. Your money arrives in the country before you do. It cannot be taken from you.” Roland Bewick builds the software that makes that sentence true—and just taught an AI agent to do the same thing. Episode Summary Most Bitcoin wallets promise self-custody but keep offering the easy custodial shortcut. Alby killed theirs. In January 2025, the team shut down a custodial wallet processing over a million transactions a month and told users, Run your own node or leave. Roland Bewick, the developer who built Alby Hub to make that transition possible, walks through what happened when principle met user expectations—the complaints, the creative excuses, and why the team chose sovereignty over growth. The conversation then moves into new territory: AI agents that hold their own Bitcoin wallets, pay for their own infrastructure, and even spawn child agents without a human touching a credit card. Roland details his autonomous agent onboarding project, where an OpenClaw agent rented a server, funded a child agent, and purchased AI credits using Lightning—all without KYC, all without permission. The result is a blueprint for self-sovereign AI operating on…

People in this episode

Host: Shawn Yeager

Guest: Roland Bewick

Topics covered

• self-custody
• Bitcoin
• AI agents
• sovereignty
• financial autonomy

Keywords

• self-custody
• Bitcoin wallets
• AI agents
• Alby Hub
• financial sovereignty

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Alby, OpenClaw

Products: Alby Hub, Bitcoin, Lightning

Places: January 2025

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