It’s 2026 and we’re already seeing AI agents transition from passive assistants to active task executioners.
Your next trade might come from a bot, not from your clicks, according to Vibhu Norby, who leads product strategy and AI adoption at Solana Foundation.
“99.99% of all onchain transactions in 2 years will be driven by agents, bots, and LLM-based wallets and trading products,” Norby wrote on X on Wednesday. The UI is disappearing into language.”
On Solana, AI agents are already making millions of transactions, mostly for small, pay-per-use digital services. This highlights a shift toward automated, programmatic payments in a usage-based digital economy, according to Norby.
“Since 2026 came around, Solana is now 65% of all agentic payments through x402 at least,” Norby said at the Digital Asset Summit in New York this week. “We’re really focused on this because I think it is something net new for the world where I can pay per resource instead of bundling these up into a subscription or into a single payment for something.”
Infrastructure and developer tooling
Norby’s team has been building the infrastructure to accelerate this transition.
In early February 2026, he assembled a new product group tasked with creating AI-ready interfaces for both enterprises and everyday users.
That effort produced the Solana Developer Platform, a suite of APIs covering payments, tokenized assets, and compliance tooling aimed at financial institutions such as Mastercard and Western Union, both of which have begun integrating with the platform.
Solana became the first major blockchain to place a machine-readable skill file at the root of its website, a technical detail Norby highlighted at the summit, so that AI agents can autonomously learn how to create wallets, execute transactions, and interact with on-chain programs without human intervention.
Rapid scale-up
Outside the Solana Foundation, the ecosystem of agent development frameworks is growing.
ElizaOS, an open-source toolkit for building on-chain AI agents, has attracted more than 17,600 stars on GitHub, making it one of the most popular repositories at the intersection of crypto and AI.
The Virtuals Protocol ecosystem reported 1.78 million jobs completed by autonomous agents as of February 2026.
At Coinbase, the AI groundwork has been laid for some time. From AgentKit letting AI autonomously interact with blockchain, to x402 enabling instant stablecoin payments, the firm has been actively preparing the future of AI in crypto.
Like Norby, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also believes transaction activity may soon be dominated by AI agents rather than humans.
Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions.
They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet. Think about it.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 9, 2026
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
