Solana Prez Touts Blockchain’s Usefulness for Payments

Solana Foundation’s president says increasing corporate stablecoin adoption is validating blockchain’s role as global financial infrastructure.

This trend is also setting the stage for AI-driven “machine economies,” said Lily Liu, whose comments Tuesday (May 5) at Consensus Miami 2026 were reported by CoinDesk.

According to the report, Liu cited recent stablecoin payment integrations from Meta and Western Union as proof that large enterprises increasingly see blockchain rails as practical infrastructure and not speculative technology.

“It’s not new,” Liu said, pointing to Visa’s decision in 2023 to build stablecoin settlement capabilities on Solana after what she characterized as an “extensive objective review” of blockchain networks.

“Fast and cheap is a no-brainer for payments,” she said, noting that enterprises also need deep liquidity, developers and a broad ecosystem of applications around those payment rails.

Liu said Western Union’s move onto blockchain infrastructure was a landmark for the digital asset industry, calling the money transfer company “the white whale” for the crypto sector.

Her speech also touched on the advantages of blockchain rails over traditional payment systems in allowing sub-dollar transactions and real-time payment streaming.

“The vast majority of transactions that happen on the internet are actually of microtransaction value,” Liu said. “You literally cannot process those individual transactions because you’ve got to put them through credit cards.”

Liu spent some time defending Solana ecosystem’s recent interventions after hacks involving projects such as Vault and Drift, saying preserving industry confidence is sometimes more important than decentralized finance rivalries.

PYMNTS wrote about the rising institutional adoption of blockchain last week, arguing that as stablecoins scale, so do their risks.

“Fraud, scams and illicit activity remain persistent challenges,” the report said. “But the growing regulatory push is not necessarily a headwind for the industry. In many respects, it reflects a recognition that stablecoins may be becoming systemically important.”

The features that make stablecoins attractive — speed, accessibility and borderless transferability — also make them ripe for misuse. Just last year, an estimated $17 billion was lost to crypto-related fraud, with AI-enabled scams dramatically increasing in sophistication.

“The amount of content created for scamming people is absolutely through the roof. Our customers are swamped,” Emmanuel Marot, vice president of products at Chainalysis, told PYMNTS in an interview about the company’s “blockchain intelligence agents.”

However, the future of the digital asset sector “sure looks bright,” Marot added, noting that “there’s a real-world usage and a need to make sure that the money goes to the right place.”