Solana (SOL) launched Payment Channels for AI agents on Thursday, reporting 1 million payments per second in testing, with Alibaba Cloud as the first partner.
Key Facts
- Solana launched Payment Channels on Thursday, with Alibaba Cloud as the first partner, and its API endpoints payable at launch.
- The Solana Foundation said a test running 100,000 wallets through a payment channel proxy issued more than 1 million payments per second.
- Payment Channels build on the x402 and MPP payment protocols, and the program, SDK, and documentation are published openly.
Solana (SOL) launched Payment Channels on Thursday, a new primitive the Solana Foundation said issued more than 1 million payments per second in testing.
The launch targets a bottleneck in agentic payments: An AI agent that needs a signature and a settlement for every call cannot operate at machine speed. Payment Channels, instead, let a user set a spending cap that an agent draws against, with settlement batched rather than executed per transaction.
Inside Solana's 1M Payments Per Second Benchmark
The test ran 100,000 unique wallets through a payment channel proxy, according to the Solana Foundation, which put that throughput at enough capacity for more than 80 billion payments in 24 hours.
Its documentation reports a settlement cycle of about 203 seconds across 100,000 channels, at a cost of $0.0078 per 1 million payments. The Foundation did not detail the hardware used in the test.
"AI will not wait at a checkout screen," wrote Rishin Sharma, head of AI growth at the Solana Foundation. "The future of internet payments needs to be built for unprecedented scale."
The design builds on x402, the HTTP-based payment standard Cloudflare and Coinbase established last year to let machines pay each other without API keys, and on the MPP session protocol. The smart contract, toolchain, SDK, and benchmark templates are published on GitHub.
Alibaba Cloud is the launch partner, with its inference API endpoints payable through the channels from day one. That follows a similar move by AWS, which integrated stablecoin payments for AI agents with Coinbase and Stripe in May.
Solana’s native SOL coin traded at $105.10 at the time of writing, up 5.8% over 24 hours and 41.8% over 30 days, according to CoinMarketCap data.
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