Solana Foundation Bets on Onchain Payments for AI Agents

AI agents need programmable, low-cost and instant payment channels to buy computing power, data and APIs autonomously. Credit-card fees make micropayments of less than $1 impractical. The Solana Foundation therefore sees stablecoins and x402 as the underlying rails of the machine economy, building on Visa’s adoption of Solana for stablecoin settlement in 2023.

On March 25, 2026, Solana Foundation Chief Product Officer Vibhu Norby said the network had processed 15 million onchain payments by AI agents and predicted that LLMs would initiate 95% to 99% of future transactions. The foundation promoted x402 in San Francisco on April 7. On May 6, President Lily Liu cited Western Union’s adoption of stablecoins as further evidence, though she did not disclose the total transaction value.