The Solana Foundation is making a strategic push to establish the Solana blockchain as the foundational infrastructure for an emerging "agentic" internet, where artificial intelligence systems autonomously initiate and execute economic activity. This vision was outlined by Vibhu Norby, Chief Product Officer of the Solana Foundation, during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in New York.
"AI is not really a vertical. It's a platform shift… affecting everything across every industry, including crypto," Norby stated, framing the integration of AI and blockchain as a transformative event. At the core of Solana's strategy is enabling payments for AI agents. Norby revealed that the network has already "processed 15 million payments onchain from agents," primarily for machine-to-machine commerce.
He emphasized that the programmability of crypto payments is a key attraction for AI systems, predicting that "stablecoins are going to be the default thing that agents use to pay for any computational resource." This shift, Norby believes, could revolutionize internet monetization models by facilitating sub-cent, pay-per-use transactions that traditional financial systems cannot support efficiently.
The Foundation argues that Solana's performance-focused architecture gives it a competitive advantage in this new paradigm. "Agents are cold, calculated machines… they don't subscribe to crypto religiosity," Norby noted. "If you ask an agent what's the best way to pay for something with crypto, most of the time, Solana is showing up at the top."
To cater to this future, Solana developers are building directly for AI systems, focusing on creating machine-readable "skill" files and AI-first developer platforms that provide the APIs and documentation that agents require. Norby forecasts a dramatic change in user interaction, predicting that "The default way people will interact with crypto is going to be through their agent… 95 to 99% of all transactions… will be coming from LLMs."
