Each month, we explore one founder’s journey of building on Solana, as well as noteworthy network updates to help you get up to speed.
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Rishin Sharma, head of AI growth, Solana Foundation: How AI Agents are Changing Payments
This episode is part of the Solana Sessions podcast series by Token Relations and the Talking Tokens podcast, where we dive into the startups and founders building on Solana. Check out the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
In this episode of Solana Sessions, we sat down with Rishin Sharma, the head of AI growth at the Solana Foundation, to discuss the state of agentic payments, how AI agents are starting to pay for goods and services using stablecoins, and why the Foundation has built a product to bring merchants onchain.
Google’s Constraint Inspired Solana to Create Pay.sh
AI agents are great at researching products, but they tend to run into hurdles when they try to finalize purchases. With payment standards such as x402 and MPP, AI agents can send money to each other and to businesses, but most companies that sell services, data and software prefer to charge in the form of monthly plans or prepaid credits. Consequently, AI agents can’t pay for these services as they prefer simpler paths for individual transactions.
Sharma said even Google Cloud faced this conundrum as the company was considering agentic payments. “The Google Cloud team was checking out what's going on in these payment protocols, except they didn't want to accept stablecoins,” Sharma said. “Google is a huge org and to put together stablecoins as a new payment method takes a really long time.”
That friction gave the Solana Foundation the idea to build a payment layer that sits between merchants and AI agents. Pay.sh gives AI assistants their own wallets and a list of services they can buy. The app then uses Solana to handle the payment on the backend so the business can sell to the agent without having to interact with the blockchain, or even digital assets, at all.
Sharma said the Foundation saw that building a layer that lets businesses charge as needed for their services would suddenly allow them to expose themselves to an entirely new kind of customer. “All of these people have this existing billing method, which is primarily like you have a subscription, you get an API key, there's some credit-based billing,” Sharma said. “How do we change that business model for something that makes more sense in an agentic context? That's where pay-per-request makes a lot of sense.”
When Solana first designed Pay.sh, the team envisioned developers buying Google services to be its main user base. But after shipping the product internally, they found it was most used for Amazon checkouts, which demonstrated how flexible the product could be.
“You can buy anything that you would buy on Amazon, directly within your interface, without even having to login or create an Amazon account,” Sharma said. “Those are the small moments where the product feels like magic.”
The Biggest Updates on Solana
Look into the biggest announcements, developments and more happening within the Solana ecosystem.
Solana is offering a seven-week developer course which provides direct experience and hands-on learning with tools such as Token 2022, native rust optimization, and how to build a vault and escrow it.
MoneyGram launched Ramps to Solana, giving developers a single API that connects onchain apps directly to cash deposits. It uses the Solana Developer Platform’s payments module, and lets devs add fiat on- and off-ramps without needing to create their own banking integrations.
Western Union launched Stablecard, a mobile app that lets payments recipients hold and spend money using its stablecoin, USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital on Solana. The app uses Visa for payments.
Kamino released an Institutional Yield vault service that routes deposits into offchain lending using Solana. Starting with a Commodity Yield Vault, it targets 7% to 8% APY, and uses deposits to fund short-term loans to commodity traders.
Re launched reUSD on Solana, a stablecoin backed by reinsurance underwriting portfolios spread across 49 U.S. states. The asset bridges from Ethereum via Chainlink CCIP, and is available on Kamino and Jupiter Lend.
That’s all for now. Catch you again next month!
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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.