The Solana Foundation is positioning the network as the core infrastructure for an emerging “agentive” Internet, where AI systems—not humans—initiate and execute economic activity.
“AI is not really a vertical. It’s a platform shift… affecting everything across every industry, including crypto,” said Vibhu Norby, Chief Product Officer of the Solana Foundation, during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in New York.
At the center of Solana’s strategy is payments. Norby said the network has already “processed 15 million payments onchain from agents,” mostly linked to machine-to-machine trading. “The programmatic aspect of crypto payments is what makes it interesting for agents,” he said, adding that “stablecoins will be the default thing that agents use to pay for any computational resource.”
This shift can fundamentally reshape internet business models, Norby believes. “Agent payments are probably going to change the whole way the internet is monetized,” he said, pointing to the ability to support subcent-per-cent payments. usage transactions that traditional rails cannot handle.
The Solana Foundation claims 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 what’s the best way to pay for something with crypto, Solana mostly comes up at the top.”
At the same time, advances in AI are eroding longstanding developer barriers, noting that tools now make it easier for developers and machines to build across ecosystems.
In response, Solana developers are building directly into AI systems. “What agents like are APIs and documentation and skills,” Norby said, pointing to initiatives like machine-readable “skills” files and AI-first developer platforms.
Looking ahead, Norby expects a dramatic shift in user behavior: “The default way people will interact with crypto will be through their agent… 95 to 99% of all transactions… will come from LLMs.”
Read more: Solana Foundation uses Mastercard, Western Union, Worldpay for institutional developer platform
