The Solana Foundation is positioning the network as central infrastructure for an emerging “agent” Internet, where artificial intelligence systems (not humans) initiate and execute economic activity.
“AI is not really a vertical. It’s a platform shift… affecting everything across industries, including crypto,” said Vibhu Norby, chief product officer at the Solana Foundation, during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in New York.
At the center of Solana’s strategy are payments. Norby said the network has already “processed 15 million agent chain payments,” largely tied to machine-to-machine commerce. “The programmatic aspect of crypto payments is what makes them interesting to agents,” he said, adding that “stablecoins will be the default element that agents will use to pay for any computational resource.”
Norby believes this shift could fundamentally reshape Internet business models. “Agent payments will likely change the entire way the Internet is monetized,” he said, pointing to the ability to support sub-cent pay-as-you-go transactions that traditional railroads cannot handle.
The Solana Foundation maintains that the network’s performance-focused design gives it an advantage in this new paradigm. “Agents are cold, calculating machines…they don’t subscribe to crypto-religiosity,” Norby said. “If you ask an agent the best way to pay for something with cryptocurrency, most of the time, Solana comes out on top.”
At the same time, advances in AI are eroding long-standing barriers for developers, with tools now seen enabling developers and machines to build in ecosystems more easily.
In response, Solana developers are building directly for AI systems. “What agents like are APIs, documentation and skills,” Norby said, pointing to initiatives like machine-readable “skills” files and AI-first development platforms.
Looking ahead, Norby expects a dramatic change in user behavior: “The default way people will interact with cryptocurrencies will be through their broker… 95 to 99% of all transactions… will come from LLM.”
Read more: The Solana Foundation turns to Mastercard, Western Union and Worldpay for an institutional development platform
