Solana Foundation President Lily Liu said the growing adoption of stablecoins by major corporations validates blockchain’s evolution into global financial infrastructure while laying the groundwork for AI-powered “machine economies.”
Speaking at Consensus Miami 2026 on Tuesday, Liu pointed to recent announcements involving Meta and Western Union integrating stablecoin payments on Solana as evidence that large companies are increasingly seeing blockchain rails as practical infrastructure rather than speculative technology.
“It’s not new,” Liu said, referring to Visa’s decision in 2023 to build stablecoin settlement capabilities on Solana after what she described as a “comprehensive objective review” of blockchain networks.
“Fast and cheap is a no-brainer for payments,” she said, adding that companies also need deep liquidity, developers and a broad ecosystem of applications around these payment rails.
Liu described Western Union’s transition to blockchain infrastructure as a particularly significant milestone for the crypto industry. “When I first entered this industry in 2014, Western Union was always the white whale crypto,” she said.
Exploring the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence, Liu argued that blockchain-based payments are uniquely suited to “agent commerce,” where AI agents trade autonomously with other machines and services.
Traditional internet payment systems remain heavily dependent on credit cards, making micropayments financially impractical due to interchange fees, Liu said. Blockchain rails, on the other hand, enable sub-dollar transactions and real-time payment streaming.
“The vast majority of transactions that happen on the Internet are actually of microtransaction value,” Liu said. “You literally can’t process these individual transactions because you have to transfer them via credit card.”
Liu also defended the Solana ecosystem’s recent crackdown following security incidents involving projects like Vault and Drift, saying that maintaining industry trust sometimes outweighs competitive rivalry in decentralized finance.
Looking ahead, Liu argued that the industry is still underestimating blockchain’s ultimate role. Rather than acting primarily as generalized technology platforms, she said blockchains are fundamentally “financial rails first and foremost.”
She added that crypto’s long-term promise could extend beyond payments to what she called “Internet capital markets,” allowing companies and sovereign entities around the world to gain more direct access to global capital formation.
