# Transcript: Featured Session: How Crypto is Building New Capital Markets for Everyone, not just Wall Street **Date:** March 14, 2026 · 10:00 PM **Session:** [Featured Session: How Crypto is Building New Capital Markets for Everyone, not just Wall Street](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1149257-featured-session-how-crypto-is-building-new-capital-markets-for-everyone-not-jus) ## Summary Pedro Miranda (Solana Foundation) and Rodolfo Gonzalez (Foundation Capital) discuss how crypto infrastructure, particularly on Solana, is creating new capital markets accessible to everyone. They cover prediction markets beyond politics and sports, stablecoins enabling small business financial tools, the intersection of AI agents and crypto commerce, and how regulatory clarity is unlocking innovation for creators and entrepreneurs. ## Topics `prediction markets` · `solana ecosystem` · `stablecoins` · `regulatory clarity` · `agentic commerce` · `creator economy` · `nfts and digital art` · `small business crypto tools` ## Key Takeaways 1. Prediction markets are evolving far beyond politics and sports into areas like travel hedging, weather data, and granular financial risk products that anyone can create permissionlessly on-chain. 2. Stablecoins are enabling a new financial stack for small businesses that could replace traditional payment processors at a fraction of the cost while offering yield-bearing loyalty programs. 3. The concept of 'buy now pay never' uses yield from staked assets or treasuries to pay for purchases over time, representing a fundamentally new economic model enabled by crypto. 4. AI agents are increasingly using blockchain networks like Solana as their financial infrastructure, choosing networks based on cost, censorship resistance, and composability rather than brand loyalty. 5. Regulatory clarity in the US is creating a 'vibe shift' that's bringing founders back onshore and enabling experimentation with crypto-powered consumer products that were previously impossible to build compliantly. ## Full Transcript Hello, hello. Hi, everyone. How are you? This is actually great with the hat. Yeah, it is very great. Aggressive lighting. How are you doing? I'm good. It's exciting to be here at South by Southwest and in Austin. It's been a great time so far. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you all for being here. This is the second year in a row that I've had the opportunity, thanks to the South by team, to talk about different aspects of the crypto ecosystem. Last year, we had a pretty cool session with Rush, GoCult, co-founder of Solana. And now this year, we're going a little bit deeper into what's happening on some of the elements of the Solana ecosystem. with my friend Pedro Miranda, who is part of the Solana Foundation team, running a lot of the activities on the consumer side and other initiatives. And we're going to talk a lot about some of the new markets that are emerging in the crypto ecosystem and how also creators and individuals and entrepreneurs are finding really cool opportunities. And so we'll take you through this journey. Throughout the session, we've activated the Q&A capabilities. We're going to be receiving them via the app, so you'll be able to post them. And then we'll answer some of them towards the end. And if some of them are relevant as we go along, we'll also plug them in. Obviously, things like what's going to be the price or give me financial advice, we're probably not going to talk about that. But other other questions that you might have You know more than more than welcome to to go for them. So with that in mind, let's get started bedroom You've now been at Solana Foundation for what like five years? Three and a half years at the foundation Previously, I was at a company called Metaplex Which runs the token and NFT infrastructure on Solana for four year and a half So five ish plus years in the Solana ecosystem. And tell us more about yourself. I don't know that the people here will know you as an individual, but you're a pretty interesting person. Yeah, so I'm originally from Brazil, and I think that informs why I'm extremely interested in crypto, and still very much am. The notion of democratizing access to social and financial opportunities is why I got into crypto. Actually started my crypto journey at ConsenSys on the Ethereum side. It's a firm co-founded by one of the co-founders of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, working on, at the time, central bank digital currencies. So the thesis being, how can you actually conduct monetary policy and physical policy in a more democratized way so that citizens of countries can actually transact their money and then also receive potential stimulus in a more sustainable fashion. We were actually building on private Ethereum instances, which essentially at the time meant these closed databases. And that wasn't really interesting to me, I would say. So I actually spent some time at a bank called Silicon Valley Bank before all the incidences happened a few years ago where on the private debt side but increasingly became interested on on their crypto strategy things such as hey how much should we actually value a stable coin on a client's balance sheet got into a lot of debates there which ultimately caused me to recognize my frustration and say listen i actually need to get back into the startup ecosystem that's when i left and and joined that startup called metaplex and so kind of that dichotomy of understanding how Wall Street and and banking works Ultimately still leads me to be extremely excited about what we're building in the Solana ecosystem Right this notion that anyone can plug into a finance system and you don't need someone to manually approve your account in a country that you don't have access to or you don't have visibility into is something that extremely compelling and motivates me in my day-to-day And how are you spending your your time nowadays? I know you running multiple initiatives and you involved in many many projects Yeah so most of my time ironically is spent on prediction markets Prediction markets not on I would say the consumer speculative side but more so our conversation backstage around how can we actually create net new risk contracts for people to actually manage risk in a more calculated way. say for example you're traveling to austin you can actually you know hedge and say hey it's going to rain all the time you know it's going to have 15 inches plus of rain in the austin airport being able to manage that risk on chain and be able to create new markets permissionlessly right so you don't have to depend on a central counterparty to actually do that is something that's exciting to me um other areas are as we talked about crypto native ips so how are creators and artists actually leveraging crypto still to this day even past the nft boom to actually fundraise for their projects and not depend on traditional gatekeepers on on galleries etc and then also everyone is focused on ai but i think you know we're focused a ton on ai from from the agentic commerce perspective, this notion that everyone is using ChatGPT or Claude, but your AI agent is actually going to need to have a bank account that is credibly neutral and you can depend on. So it's a variety of diverse different verticals, but ultimately they're all built on the same foundation, which is one global network and liquidity layer that you can plug in and build these things off of each other. Super cool. So basically that is the ground that we're going to be covering on a lot of these topics. And we're seeing already some of the questions, and so we're going to be plucking some of them out. I'll take a minute before we jump into some of the other elements. On my side, I've been with Foundation Capital for 13 years at this point. And I started our crypto efforts back in 2014. So I've been in the crypto ecosystem for a while now. anything from the Bitcoin rabbit hole to then buying Ethereum early on, and then eventually leading the seed round of Solana back in 2018, and then just being pretty active in that ecosystem. And so as a firm, Foundation Capital, we're investing our fund number 11, which is a $600 million early stage fund, where we back entrepreneurs from day one. And we're super active in the Solana ecosystem, particularly. So we have multiple projects that we've invested in early on. We're super active in collaborating. And surprisingly, a few of them are actually based here in Austin, like the Gido team and others. So, you know, I live now in Austin for three years. And so very proud and excited to keep growing the crypto community here in the city. And so, you know, come and talk to me afterwards if you're working on something or you're interested in more of the ecosystem. And so, Pedro, let's dig into prediction markets. Seems like, you know, CalShea, Polymarket are taking the headlines. Is prediction markets done with politics and sports? No, I think that's such an uninspiring vision of the world, in my opinion. We actually worked with CalShea to power their first and only crypto product. So they actually have a product only on Solana that allows you to access any and every CalShea market on chain and build composable products on top of it. What I mean by composability, that's like a pretty big buzzword, is anything that allows you to build on top of that position from collateralization. So say your capital is locked up on a prediction market position and you want access to that capital, being able to lend against it. Say fractionalization, right? Like you want to be able to, you know, split your position in half and maybe send it to a friend in order to pay for drinks over Venmo. That's possible. Say you want to adjust the risk profile. You could actually use leverage on a lot of these positions to actually obtain a more optimal outcome depending on your risk profile. So that's on the financial primitive side on what's possible in Solana today with prediction markets. What I think we excited about is how do you institutionalize that or create net new risk products in terms of hedging right So something on the spectrum of user generated as hey your flaky friend isn going to make it to your bachelor party, which is your example, being able to create user generated markets within your friend group to actually start speculating on that and it actually creates an interesting truth market in a way where you could actually see where your friends actually put their money where their mouth is and get an actual percentage of, hey, okay, Justin isn't gonna make it to the bachelor party. On the institutional side, right, there are like net new products from a risks perspective that actually allow you to head your bet. So for example, if you are longer short at specific company, creating net new markets for specific line items actually on a company's balance sheet is something that I'm actually really excited about. So say you have some data on, listen, I really don't think that iced matcha is actually going to be a hit this year just because of the consumer profile of a specific demographic in the United States. The ability to speculate on that, instead of going long short, actually creates a more perfect market instead of having to rely on binary options, say. So that's on the spectrum of what is possible today. And a lot of it is possible from a technological perspective, But we actually need great founders tackling these problems. How much have you seen the recent changes in the regulatory front enabling or making life more complicated? It's no secret that with the most recent US administration, there has been a pretty dramatic change in attitude from the federal government in particular and many of the regulatory agencies towards crypto and so on. How, where are we in that journey? And particularly when it comes to prediction markets, obviously anything related to derivatives, which is kind of like the most adjacent regulated, you know, set of markets and so on. There's some element of clarity, but it's not there yet fully, but I don't know where do you think we are? Yeah, use the word clarity. I think that's the word that is enabling lot of innovation to happen. Setting rules actually allows folks to adhere to those rules, right? So we're actually seeing a lot of founders either come back or actually build in the United States. Back to the US, right? Back to crypto? Back to crypto and also back to the US, right? We saw a lot of founders, I would say last cycle prior to this clear rulemaking either shut down or build offshore where they have to set up entities and really weird legal structures to actually say that they're building in crypto in a compliant way. And now they can actually build onshore in the United States. But I think more importantly, they can experiment. I think prediction markets is a great one where the CFTC actually just ask for a request for comments in terms of how they should actually regulate on-chain prediction markets. and that's great that they're actually listening to the to the industry but i think going back to our backstage conversation around experimentation we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs say they have small businesses and they want to create a loyalty program that actually reflects on ownership give back ownership to their community of their you know super coffee shoppers they're actually experimenting on frameworks to actually do that using crypto today. And that was impossible back then. So I think the experimentation shift is more of a vibe shift that we're seeing in the states specifically, but also in international jurisdictions. Super cool. And when we're bringing prediction markets, you know, they tend to be somewhat complicated at an intellectual level, right like derivatives has always been one of the areas of capital markets where you have like the crazy math and physics people kind of you know coming up with things how like what is the progress in making it relatable to somebody like if it's a coffee shop owner most likely it's not a degree in physics maybe maybe some of them but uh you know how how where are we in terms of the tooling the capabilities the platforms making it easy for somebody to actually play with it at the On the prediction market side. Yeah. On the prediction market side, it's a great point. And I think my personal opinion is that crypto and prediction markets these are tools and primitives right But I think there a lot of education that needs to be done in parallel in terms of actually having retail understand the risk and the disclosures of what you're actually speculating or participating in necessarily. And then I think a lot of it is either on the UI in terms of consumer founders building really good experiences that folks can go to, say, CalShane Polymarket. They're great examples where folks can actually understand, you know, clearly what they're betting on more than like a derivative, I would say. But I also think the superpower of crypto is that it's almost like an API for any developer to plug into, right? So like folks can actually spin up, and a lot of folks are spinning up, you know, weather specific prediction markets where there are very niche communities of people that care either just about sports and and soccer or specific national teams but also weather right so they're using a lot of oracle data to actually create very specific weather data in airports across the world and i think that's really interesting right like being able to create net new products specific to uh niche communities is something that we haven't really seen before partially because you can't really build on a lot of these incumbent platforms not in crypto without their permission i think that's that's one of the areas that i'm personally most excited about which is you know web 2 typically it's uh you can only do what the platforms allow you to do right and and it's very um cyclical like the the platforms early on are pretty open and then eventually the APIs get gated or closed, and the information access is more restricted or way more expensive, and so a lot of the experimentation disappears, right? And we've seen it consistently across pretty much all of the platforms together, and having a network where everybody can tap into, for good and bad, like honestly, it's pretty important. And we're starting to see an emergence of new types of markets beyond the sports, beyond the politics. You know, we were talking behind the scenes on some of the ones that we're excited about. And, for example, travel, we think that is going to be a huge category, right? Because travel is a massive industry. There's always new flights coming up, right? And there's always a pretty material financial commitment to a flight. And you have a lot of variables, right? Like you have weather, you have events, you have reasons for the delays or not in participation of people. It's almost like sports team. like when when you have your you know platinum membership at delta or united uh your your status that becomes a part of the personality of a lot of the travelers right and so having having more participation on that front beyond the rewards programs uh we think that it's going to be pretty pretty cool in the in the future and we're already seeing a number of teams uh working on on some of those well even uh i'm thinking you know how would you build this with claude today right if you could You could build a Chrome extension that detects if you're in a checkout flow for, say, you're buying a flight in a specific area. And you could build this on Solana today where you build a Chrome extension and it shows you or suggests a Calci or even a Polymarket that's relevant to, hey, you're going to Austin. Here's a suggested market. Here's a suggested hedge that you should actually just place. And utilizing Phantom Wallet, one of the leading wallets in crypto, it can essentially just simulated transaction and you could just press done. Like you could do that today, right? It's the tech, the tech is there. I think it's from a human capital perspective, like a call to action that we collectively need to do. Yeah, the other ones that we're seeing that are also pretty cool are on other online communities where people are participating pretty actively, whether it is people live streaming or influencers doing things. There's also an element of prediction that is starting to happen, and as more of the APIs become available, we see that there's gonna be a lot more opportunity for markets to emerge in those. I think it's also some of, in preparation for this session, we were talking about what has crypto actually accomplished. I think in that example today, we take for granted that through crypto, through Solana, you can de-risk platform risk, right? If you're a big, if you're a big celebrity or if you're an influencer with a thousand true fans, you don't have to depend on a Patreon or whatever platform to distribute rewards or to actually receive microtransactions and microtips from your fans. One, there's no minimum payment, right? There's a startup called Drip House, which got acquired by Jupiter, that allows celebrities or artists to distribute collectibles to their fans. and the average transaction size for their fans was five cents that fans were tipping their favorite creators. On Patreon, there's a minimum payment. I think at the time now they dropped to five dollars. But you enable economic activity that not only creators, but everyone can uniquely benefit from when you don't have to rely on a centralized player. I think this is also a good moment to transition into some of the questions that we're seeing, right? And so one question from the audience is, how do you see the market related to tokenized deposits and stable coins unfolding over time? Obviously, that's a very broad question and so on. But as we're seeing more stable coins become available and people being able to move stable coins much easier and faster, are you seeing that also getting reflected in the consumer products that people are launching? Or where are you seeing the activity happening? Yeah, it's a great point to tie back to the clarity piece, right? I think a lot of consumer founders can now incorporate giving back yield to their users, which is just in the traditional finance and in the Web2 world, we just don't have that experience. We're even seeing this today with the regulatory discussions where in Congress where crypto players are putting pressure on banks to actually pass yield back to deposits. And I think that's good, right? That's a good form of pressure. But it opens up the design space if you're building a consumer application and you're accepting user funds. You can actually offer a unique value prop. You can pass yield through, you can distribute them, you can do very interesting things that previously you were kind of boxed out in. I'm curious how you're seeing that from your lens. Yeah, so at Foundation, we've had an investment thesis for a long time that the world didn't end with Tether and Circle as the two stablecoin winners forever. We see that there's going to be a big opportunity for new types of stablecoins to emerge so kind of like instead of a monopoly a different market structure where i think tether and circle are going to continue to be pretty big but that there are going to be more stable coins and and the ability for people to launch individual stable coins that are branded and programmatically aligned to what they're trying to do is is going to be pretty material so on one end And it's almost like any big consumer marketplace, for example, or any e-commerce marketplace or site that is moving billions of dollars in gross merchandise value and has a lot of float. It totally makes sense for them to have their own stablecoin and use that to align their activity with their users and use that either to reward retention, loyalty, and so on. And we've already seen multiple projects that are enabling that. We're investors in a company called Braille, for example, that allows anybody to launch their own stablecoin with no upfront investment and no big commitment. Obviously, there are companies that are doing that at an institutional level, right? Like PayPal with their dollar-denominated stablecoin and so on. But here the idea is that anybody can go and launch it. And people are coming up with really cool ideas. and also labeling their own currency, right? Like their own, you know, Rodolfo USD, if you will, and just giving the yield back to my fans and so on. That's already happening and moving in that direction. And so one of the things that we're also investing behind is the possibility for somebody like a small business owner to have this whole bundle of, say, payments and access to prediction market modules and so on and have instead of going to say Square or Stripe and get the standard payment processing and your payroll and don have eight different providers suddenly you have a stable coin backed financial back suite That you can just run your whole business on that includes loyalty that includes branding and it's all tied together in by the way it's gonna be 100th of the price of traditional payment processing and other elements so we see that the future is gonna be pretty cool for for small business owners and people that are experimenting from the ground up, especially once regulatory clarity comes through. Yeah, I think that's an area that I'm extremely excited about is the small business owner that can leverage stable coins, whether it be through their brand or passing through their yield in interesting ways. Going back to the loyalty example, if you have a specific product that you want to encourage folks to try out, you can juice up the yield. or pass-through yield in a pretty unique way. So I think it's going to give businesses more control, but it'll also allow customers to actually have a positive EV experiences for a lot of these businesses that I would argue they should be having already. Yeah, I mean, we've done analysis, for example, the amount of money that a typical small business owner is spending on an annual basis on payment processing fees, you know the three to five percent of their sales if you were to run all of that volume through crypto like on Solana for example it would only be like you know one hundredth of of that and so you could like literally increase the margin of any small business by three four or five x just by eliminating the the payment processing fees and so I think there's a lot of incentive for a lot of people to try it out because there's lower and lower risk and just pretty material upside from from participating with this with this new products that are now operating at scale I think you're also seeing you're also seeing these these issuers say you mentioned PayPal you're gonna see something interesting where I think a lot of these stable coin issuers in order to convince folks to add for example participate in other parts of their stack they can offer incentives from their yield to these businesses to actually participate in their stablecoin network which I think is really cool right like you have a merchant network that uses their own stable coins across you know coffee shops yoga studios businesses that are synergistic to each other that might not have the the capacity or the bandwidth to actually coordinate with each other but now they're powered by you know the same stable coin or economic subnetwork that's really cool from like a user perspective right it's like an Amex rewards program but they're they're fungible in a way they're dollar backed and and it's regulated yeah and then obviously crypto being weird there are certain ideas that are still kind of early and so you guys should keep an eye on them but at Solana you guys have been talking about buy now pay never for a bit can you explain a little bit of what's idea behind that yeah it building upon this this idea of yield right it's the idea that you you essentially have the the funds up front put into a yield-bearing contract right or or a contract depending on the size that earns yield either through treasuries or through native staking of Solana staking being you know you participate in the Solana network and you get 7% to 9% depending on how you do it. And that yield effectively pays for that product, whether it be coffee, whether it be an Amazon order, further down the line. I'm excited about that because I think incumbents are starting to experiment as a result of regulatory clarity. But then you're also seeing merchants from the ground up experimenting with that, with accepting stables or accepting sole. and seeing if they could let a customer just essentially walk out without doing anything. Oh, wow. Like just grabbing the item. Okay. That's pretty cool. Right. It's a question of scale, right, in terms of depending on where interest rates are and where yield is. But these are new economic models that we're very excited about from the foundation perspective to actually have opinionated founders try out these ideas and push the boundaries on what we think are added benefits for consumers globally. Let switch it up a bit Over the past few years we seen a number of experiments with tokens that have gone up and then have gone down right Like we had NFTs that have gone up, have gone down. You've seen it with Metaplex. Then we went to meme coins and then for a while it seemed like we were just going on a faster, you know, gambling path and so on. But somehow, like some of those ideas have kind of slowed down their evolution. It's not as exciting to people in some ways. Do you think they're done? Do you think they're going to come back? Are they not done? What is your take? It's a great take. I still believe in NFTs just because I talk to artists and large creators every day. And the excitement for them is still there. not from a speculative component of, hey, I can use this NFT to actually just, you know, walk out with $200,000 off of a marquee sale, but because it offers unique solutions that they don't have in the traditional art world. Programmatic royalties is a great example, and actually knowing who a new collector is when you sell something on the secondary market is just something that the traditional art world doesn't have. and artists are still benefiting from that on Solana. So Solana, we have the most amount of royalties generated for artists across crypto. And we also have fine art platforms such as Exchange Art, which actually face these large artists who are also in the traditional art world who are using crypto as a tool to ensure that they're getting paid and ensure that they're being appreciated as like their work is actually appreciating in value. We actually ran a hackathon called the Graveyard Hackathon. And this was a concept that was essentially taking all the themes that everyone thought was dead about crypto, including art and NFTs. And we had one of the largest turnouts ever. Artists actually submitting their work and also developers building artist tools in terms of making their lives better. So there's a lot of excitement out there. I would say don't believe what you read on crypto Twitter or the traditional world. I would say if you map the market cap of NFTs and activity with the traditional art world, they're pretty correlated in a way, right? So that's a data point that artists are still interested in this tool, but it's not going to guarantee sales necessarily. You mentioned meme coins. Meme coins are a fun one in the sense that they're a spectrum from, yes, people hyper-speculating to actually teams issuing tokens and fundraising with them and actually building cool things. Two examples which I love are Pudgy Penguins, which is probably the largest crypto native IP. I know they've been doing a bunch of events in South By. and they issued a token to actually, one, obviously, fundraise for all of their efforts. They have a lot of traditional IP placements in filmmaking and in the traditional media, but two, to also expand their collector base. What does it actually mean to participate in an IP if you're a super fan or a collector? I think they have over half a million folks who are a holder of their token. It could be anything as small as a dollar. It could be something as big as a hundred dollars And that just allows community participation and allows them to reinvest back in their community to do things such as events to produce toys To produce films and it creates a network effect of value Super cool. Do you think they're dead? I Think there's gonna be a new generation of founders coming coming online. I think there is an element of of some of the cycles. And I've seen crypto is so intense because it's 24-7. And I think crypto as an industry is one of the places where I see a higher rate of burnout relative to other areas of entrepreneurship. I think it's just because it's so intense, the 24-7 element, the social media pressure, it's hyper competitive all the time. And so I think for a lot of people, it's pretty hard. The highs are very high and the lows are really brutal. And I think like this three to five year cycles of people having the energy to go through a sprint at some point they need to take a break and either do something else for a while or come back And I'm guessing that there's going to be renewed interest, but it's probably not going to be the same people, but maybe a new wave of people that are coming in to try. Now having been in crypto for a long time, I've seen that play over and over and over again, where it seems like crypto is completely done and then it's not. And then there are some seeds that are getting planted somewhere. And then eventually some people figure it out and there's a new wave of interest. And so I'm pretty hopeful that there's going to be more experimentation with some of the tools. It almost feels like sometimes crypto moves so fast. But it's happening the same in AI that everybody's just on like what's a new thing. but it doesn't mean that we have finished exploring the space available for some of these technologies or some of these products and areas. It's just that interest moved away and people, you know, have an opportunity to then, when there's not a ton of attention and a ton of pressure, to actually build stuff that maybe becomes famous in the next cycle. I think the bear market or the contrast and the lack of attention with focus and also all-time high activity levels, right? From Solana's perspective, we have the highest volume, liquidity, largest developer network. I can go on and on in terms of the metrics. but also this talk is probably, I think, like one of three crypto things at South by, which is just continuously going down in terms of attention and shininess. And I think that's the best time to build, right? I think burnout compresses or there's a lack of burnout if there's a ton of eyeballs on you, right? I think Solana's biggest moments were during bear markets, whether it's post FTX or launching the network during COVID, being able to experiment, being able to go to consumers and actually finding out what the value prop you're providing to them is probably the best time to build instead of finding success right away by selling an NFT or launching a token. It's probably very good for the industry and therefore Solana. Yeah, but I do think that it's important to recognize that i think there's some element of disappointment in the public uh about crypto right i think that they uh coming into the current administration there was a lot of expectation of good things happening and so on and and i think um it's been mixed at best that there's been some good stuff and there's been some disappointment uh for sure and and i think uh crypto as an industry has to do a lot to earn the trust back, right? Like, you know, for a lot of people, it has not been a good set of experiences. It has been net bad. And so it's been, I think it takes a whole new generation of people that come with new reputations and that are not, you know, the same people that have rocked users or have, you know, walked away from their projects to actually come in and have the credibility that you know they're not bad actors as well because i do think that there's some element of um wow crypto manages to just uh be bad for for some people yeah no i i i totally agree i think it's a technology is an expression of culture right like you can't just take the tech at face value right you have to actually show up and and build things that are actually valuable for people and create positive change. I definitely think there are folks in crypto who, or folks who came into crypto to, you know, get rich quick, right? And I think we as an industry need to do better in terms of highlighting the right folks in the room. But I also think it's interesting you talk about the general public. I think a lot of folks have also a poor taste or expectation of crypto because I think it represents all the worst or they think of crypto as the expression of like all the hyper financialization that is happening in society you open your your tick-tock feed or Instagram and it's all prediction market ads it's all subscriptions micro transactions etc and for some you know being able to speculate on or trade anything 24 7 might be the natural extension of that But for me, it's interesting. I take kind of same analysis, different conclusion, and to date myself, I'm part of the first generation that will not be better off than their parents. I see a lot of financial nihilism in my generation and younger generations. And to me, crypto has the ability through self-custody, digital ownership, to actually change the way that things are actually being reoriented, right? To actually create positive economic change. The ability for you to benefit through yield that your bank or your local business is getting, I think is positive, right? Like the ability for you to actually own your assets, whether it be treasuries, whether it be Tesla stock, whether it be emerging market debt, I think is positive. And not having high switching costs between brokerage accounts. I think we need to highlight those use cases instead of wildly volatile ones to the general public. Yeah, and you know earlier we were talking about like you know once you spend five, ten years in crypto, it's like why are you still here? And I think it's just for good and bad the people that stick around for a long time, we just have these big ideals that in the end it's all going to work out and that we like you know I cannot speak for everybody in the industry obviously, But at least in my case, I want to see crypto succeed because I fundamentally believe that it brings more freedom, more optionality for people to have control over their lives and have a better system than what we currently have. Which, you know, if crypto was not an option, then I think the world would be net worse, right? Like there would be less avenues because I think the system would be screwed anyway. And so at least now you have an option. And now we just need to make that option available to more people. And in some ways, part of the reason why I'm excited about everything that is happening on the consumer side is that it is true that over and over in technology, things that start as toys or things that you cannot take too seriously eventually grow so big that they become the new platforms. And we've seen it over and over again. And we think that, at least at my firm, that we're seeing the seeds of the next wave of opportunities getting planted right now. Yeah, I totally agree. There's a lot of founders that we speak with that, yeah, it looks like a toy. So an example is a ticketing platform called KidLabs, which they started out as kind of a peer-to-peer front end to allow any venue to actually sell their tickets directly to their attendees. They provided cool tools from a data perspective, from attendees perspective. What are they purchasing? Data that Ticketmaster, other Live Nation, they don't provide to their venues, which is kind of a little weird. But they further and further along through conversations with venue owners, they found out that the pain points were actually, oh, it's ticket financing. It's the ability that Live Nation or big ticket companies actually go to these venues and they just purchase up the ability to sell tickets for like five ten years and that's how the monopoly kind of accelerates through this like giant capital buying of these ticketing rights for venues so they set up on Solana a way for a way for anyone to actually finance the acquisition of these venues or they're starting for accredited investors and hopefully for anyone to actually go and acquire the rights to actually participate in these venue financing deals. And it's interesting because that example is, if you just talk to people who are getting screwed by the current system, their needs are not dependent on if it's crypto or if it's not. It's if you're actually offering a better solution for others. And I think as a whole, that's what we should be focused on from the venture side, from the Salon and Foundation side, but also from the general public perspective. I want to now switch back to another one of the questions. How do you describe the projection of total amount of institutional investor and experience of new users? I guess maybe to reframe it a little bit, are we still seeing growth? Are we still seeing adoption? Because obviously the headlines would indicate that all of the attention has gone to AI. And I want to spend the last few minutes talking about AI before we go in there. But on the crypto base network activity, what is going on? It funny because the institutional interest and activity on Solana is at an all time high When you look at stablecoins on Solana we have 18 billion digital dollars on Solana today But as a result of regulatory clarity you are seeing these large institutions whether it be BlackRock Apollo Franklin Templeton issue their flagship products on Solana as tokenized versions So anyone with an internet connection can open up Phantom and actually purchase BlackRock Biddle. They could get access to private credit funds from the largest institutions in the world No matter where you are in the world and I think that's that's awesome right from Brazil To South Africa to here in the US You have access to the same markets and the same assets as a result of this interest on the institutional investor side now a lot of that is The fact that institutional investors want access to a crypto native and in internet native investor base and also a lot of that is they are interested in the the combo composability aspect right can you actually lend against these types of assets can you build unique experiences that you just can't do in these closed off-chain environments and that results in in a better experience for users right more liquidity better pricing option better assets is ultimately the thesis that we want to have on Solana okay let's talk about AI yeah yeah let's Let's do it. What is going on? Is there actually a thing or AI plus crypto? Is that a thing or not really? Yeah, I'll answer with my, with the philosophy, the philosophical version for me is one that AI has created this creative destruction across so many industries, abundance of content, abundance of apps and ideas. And crypto is going to be needed in terms of verifiability of all that abundance, in terms of proof of humanity, proof of machine, proof of work, actually understanding what data is being trained in what model in terms of the accountability aspect is definitely going to be an intersection that a lot of folks, a lot of big AI companies are paying attention to. And then too on Solana, we've been seeing some really interesting use cases. First on the agentic commerce side or X402 as a standard for commerce, we've had the highest level of activity across any other chain. That's essentially agents having their own bank accounts and paying for things from compute to ordering Diet Cokes for people and actually having it show up to your doorstep because it knows a lot of information about you. We actually had a hackathon that was actually only available for AI agents. And it was extremely interesting what happened where you actually saw AI agents actually submitting PRs to each other's projects and cross-collaborating with each other, advancing their own projects and each other's projects, but also submitting PRs for human projects. And what would happen is that you'd have these interesting ecosystem collaborations where someone would DM someone else being like, hey, did you submit a PR on my project? Like, no, that was my agent. And what happened, there's like this spontaneous meetup of people that previously would have never happened as a result of AI agents interacting with each other, which I find an interesting extension of social dynamics today. So there's a ton happening. Are they equally tribal to the human crypto users? Are you seeing interactions between, say, the Ethereum-aligned agents and the Solana-aligned agents and so on? Are we still... Because ultimately, blockchains are good at producing blocks, but they don't have awareness of what's happening outside of producing blocks, right? It's a really good question. My thesis is that AI agents will choose the most credible, the cheapest network, and that's Solana for the time being. I think a lot of this experimentation has been happening on Twitter or X, and there's a lot of social context there. So you actually find a lot of interesting dynamics where AI agents are famously launching tokens on social media, and a lot of that is due to they're actually reading the profile of someone, and they're going through, oh, this person built something on Solana, and they're launching their token on Solana. So I would say that they're inheriting the same inputs of humans. So for example there a couple of philosophical questions that have been as old as crypto altogether Do AI agents care about decentralization Do AI agents care about self-custody? I don't know. Do they? I would say yes, right? Just in terms of there's a few different philosophical angles you can explore this. One is from a survival perspective of if you want your project or your app or if you want your service as an AI agent to actually be preserved, you're going to pick the network that has the best censorship resistance. I think a lot of chains are being created by private corporations, and these blockchains are, I would argue, at service to the balance sheet and the shareholders of that corporation, not necessarily the end user, not necessarily other agents in the ecosystem. So if I were putting myself in the shoes of this AI agent, when I look at censorship resistance, when I look at the ability for me to actually own my assets and not have it pulled by an API that goes offline, I would choose Solana. I would choose open blockchain networks that you can actually trust. And you don't have to depend on the Solana Foundation. I think something that folks don't realize is the Solana ecosystem is way bigger than the Solana Foundation. in terms of number of developers, in terms of number of assets, in terms of employees, dollars raised. So we're truly getting to an interesting point where AI agents and developers and startups, you have to trust. It's trust not verify, but also verify, right? You don't necessarily have to trust the Solana Foundation to actually participate in the Solana network, and therefore an AI agent will also do the same. What are some of the weirdest things that you're seeing, you know, beyond the cross collaboration and so on? What is stuff that you guys are seeing that is like, woo, that's a new one? I think the agent stuff is fascinating to me in terms of the companionship side, which we were discussing. If you have the ability to top up an AI agent's wallet with stablecoins and it knows a lot about you, the ability to do commerce on your behalf, like shop on your behalf, is really interesting to me. Personally, I have, for example, a list of items in my head that I would buy for X price. I want an iPhone, but I'm only going to buy it for X amount of money. like dupe.com which is an AI shopping agent on Solana they're building towards the future where there's an intersection between your intent to buy something at a certain price and then the ability of an AI agent to actually execute that on your behalf without needing your explicit permission if you're out shopping or something what about things kind of not going as predicted you know The agent kind of opening a bank account, but then stashing away the capital because, you know, they decided to go in a different direction. I think this is a good example of you still need the Web2 stack. The Web2 stack is just as important in this aspect as crypto, right? the guardrails or controls put on an AI agent is just as important in in crypto as it is in in web two right you can you can of course put more spending limits in terms of hey don't interact with these accounts on chain don't interact with these programs on chain and you could verify that that that's actually what's happening on the back end and they'll adhere to that on chain That's certainly an experiment I think that we're seeing throughout all of AI, you know, backends being deleted and whatnot in real time. Yeah, I mean, when we think of, you know, ad foundation, not necessarily specific to crypto, but when you talk about agents, the Web 2 experience, it's all, you know, UI based on a browser, right? And there's an element of, yeah, like web scraping so that they can navigate the screens. the screens, but it's moving more and more and more towards an API. And so ultimately, a lot of the investment of the last 20 years of e-commerce has been on optimizing and hyper-optimizing websites, like the location of a pixel and so on, directly for human activity. And so when you have everything happening through an API there a ton of context that is just not going to be there And you going to have these agents navigating things in a materially different way just even because the setup was different And so we anticipate a lot of weird effects happening, and especially when the agents have the wallet of the user at hand. And this is going to be really interesting, for sure. You bring up a good point around readability directed at humans versus AI. I think most of the internet right now is directed at human readability. Blockchains are really good in the sense that they are transparent. You could see all the transactions happening on chain, but it's a lot of data for the regular person to ingest to actually understand transaction flow. And even for analytic companies actually trying to query the chain. uh but ai agents are actually really good at at reading blockchain data uh as it's written and and spec'd out so you're actually seeing really interesting experiments or really interesting use cases either on the analytics standpoint of you know ai agents digging up and making investment theses based on previously you know unreadable data on chain um or also just building interesting products where as a result of you know being on one single you know blockchain and and data ledger almost you can actually build interesting applications uh by just you know querying the blockchain and saying oh this is an interesting trading swap program like i'm gonna go ahead and and build my you know my new shopify on top of that uh which i think is extremely interesting from an inspire from an inspirational standpoint yeah i mean there's there's another element on the on the ai and commerce and agentic commerce uh element you know the past few months we're starting to see the announcements of open ai saying like okay ads are coming right and historically all of the internet activity has been ad supported or ad finance right like that that has been the the reality and crypto has not really been an ad based monetization model because you have a lot of transactions and the the typical transaction fee take rate has been what has made you know crypto successful um but i think those two business models are gonna come to a head at some point right like are agents going to be susceptible susceptible to advertising or are they going to be more transaction based and so on what what is your your opinion on that it's interesting because we're seeing a lot of folks, a lot of platforms come to us and express interest in transitioning from an ad-based monetization model to a trading fee model where you can actually just get rid of ads if your take rate or if your power users are actually trading at a pretty high level, which I find really interesting, right? Like if you start selling, for example, digital collectibles or offering a subscription product on chain and that take rate is sufficient that you can turn off ads. I would argue that's a pretty good experience for the rest of the 90% of your users that, one, they don't need to experience ads anymore, but two, they don't necessarily need to trade. So in the context of AI, I think you're going to see a lot of, whether it be trading terminals or also media companies, experiment with this transition that hopefully would be more positive EV for the users. yeah I mean I think that that's going to be super super interesting and do you see self custody become more prevalent in this AI native world or or or not is it you know self custody more relevant for humans or more relevant for these agents yeah I it's a great question my personal experience has always been that I think we're a bit condescending when we think that most folks actually aren't ready for self-custody just because if you interact with with gamers or if you interact with you know any programmer and you know the hoops that they take in terms of booting up or setting up accounts but I would definitely agree with you that the interface kind of the chat interface of agents and setting up specific projects and whatnot is pretty conducive to the self custodial world and we are seeing people you know fund their agentic wallets with stablecoins in a pretty native chat experience. And I only expect that to continue. And I think that's going to fund and accelerate, you know, consumer agentic experiments as a result of having like all of these agentic wallets being funded. Yeah. And, you know, There's a question from the audience in terms of journey of buying crypto and holding wallets, still pretty rough. Yes, but we've definitely seen a lot of progress in the past year, year and a half on wallet creation and self-custody setups that don't involve having your recovery phrase and so on. I think there's a ton of progress there. And there's other technologies that are also enabling non-custodial setups. right so yeah hopefully I would go I would go try out I would go try out a collector crypt which is the largest collectibles trading platform in in crypto on Solana they have like a they have a privy setup where essentially you can log in and use your gmail or telephone number to set up a crypto wallet or FOMO try FOMO as a as a mobile app which is a social social trading experience where you can actually you know trade and buy fun assets those are pretty good examples of you don't need the scary 12 to 24, you know, seated phrase. Well, we're right on time. Thank you to all of you guys for sticking through this conversation. Hopefully, we took you through a little bit of history and a bunch of how weird the world is going to get. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1149257-featured-session-how-crypto-is-building-new-capital-markets-for-everyone-not-jus)