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Retail’s checkout stack may have to prepare for agentic payments sooner than we think
The e-commerce industry is going to have to reexamine its checkout stack sooner than later as AI agents learn to buy things on people’s behalf, thanks to infrastructure that’s already coming online.
Rishin Sharma, head of AI growth at the Solana Foundation, has spent the past year building at this intersection, though he says the big moment for agentic purchases is still to come.
"There hasn't been a ChatGPT-type moment for consumer applications at scale," he said on StrataMedia's Talking Tokens podcast recently.
For now, Solana Foundation's contribution to the nascent agentic payments industry is pay.sh, which gives AI agents a wallet and a catalog of services they can pay for directly. The platform is built on top of the open payment protocols, x402 and MPP, and users can use any major stablecoin, including USDC, USDT and CASH, to enable their agents to make micro-payments for software, data or services like API calls, which sometimes may cost as little as $0.001.
“Directionally, this is going to be a key unlock in how people are using agentic systems,” Sharma said.
Pay.sh gives agents access to API endpoints across about 120 services, from Google Maps and Gemini models, to restaurant reservation tools and even Amazon checkout. Essentially, it allows a user to tell their agent to send money to another agent's wallet, or purchase a service without the user ever leaving their interface.
The potential use cases for such tech are quite broad, but even Solana ended up underestimating it during development, as they thought the biggest adoption would come from developers paying for API calls. But when the Foundation’s team tested pay.sh with its own staff, they saw that users most often used it for its Amazon checkout integration, Sharma shared. "Those are the kind of small moments where these products feel like magic and you get to understand what it actually means to use this kind of stuff."
Sharma says he’s watching a change in consumer behavior play out. For example, five years ago, when researching a product or company required visiting multiple sites and looking up reviews, today, many people are simply asking their LLMs for recommendations. Sharma thinks that the future of retail’s checkout stack would bring all of this together into one conversation, with the consumer experience being telescoped down to a single interface.
Beyond payments, the next wave Sharma is building toward is agentic trading. "The next step is going to be how you bring the macro trader and the actual strategy deployment portion also into that same mobile device."
In practice that doesn’t look like an AI making trades on your behalf, at least in the near term. Instead, you have something closer to a personalized financial coach, or a system that observes your trading behavior across accounts, identifies patterns, and flags the moments where your behavior is working against your stated strategy.
"When there's extreme periods of market volatility, you tend to exhibit this kind of behavior," Sharma said, citing an example of the kind of insight these systems can surface.
That product is in beta currently, though a public launch is expected in the coming weeks from a team the Solana Foundation is working closely with. The longer goal is to build an AI system that ingests market themes, tracks the accounts and signals you follow, constructs a thesis, and proposes a strategy. And all of this is envisioned within the same interface where you're already managing the rest of your digital life.
Assets available to trade through Solana wallets now include tokenized SpaceX equity, among others, handled by teams like Backpack’s Sunrise, which means the universe for an agentic trading system is already more interesting than it was a year ago.
"It's going to be obvious in hindsight how exactly it's going to play out," Sharma said. "That's the fun game we're all getting to figure out right now."
Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.
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The latest Talking Tokens podcast 🎙️
For today’s episode, I interviewed Rishin Sharma, Head of AI Growth at the Solana Foundation, to explore how AI agents could reshape payments, commerce, and financial markets and why Solana is positioning itself as financial infrastructure for the emerging agentic economy.
Rishin breaks down how agentic payments work today, how pay.sh enables AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude to pay for services using stablecoins, and why checkout could eventually disappear into AI interfaces. They also explore the next frontier of agentic trading, from AI-assisted investing and personalized financial coaching to the possibility of having a portfolio manager in your pocket. Plus, Rishin discusses Solana's role in open, permissionless finance, the future of open-source AI, and what could emerge as AI, stablecoins, and blockchains converge.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:36 What is overhyped in AI?
02:28 Solana's role in the Agentic Economy
06:26 Getting started with Agentic Payments
07:48 Strategic collaboration with Google Cloud
11:08 Merchant adoption on the platform
14:50 The future vision of the agentic economy
17:17 The future of commerce: Checkouts without human intervention?
23:54 Agentic Trading: AI as a financial advisor and strategist
29:39 The open-source AI dilemma: Capitalism vs. Geopolitics
34:24 Integration of stablecoins in AI: Expectations for the next 12 months
39:18 Final advice and vision for builders in the sector
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