Mike Hale The Agentic Finance Report, released at CV Summit in Zurich on September 29, 2026, names Solana as the execution layer for AI agents that manage institutional capital and puts the capital within their reach at more than $4.8T over five years. The 59-page report is co-authored by TensorX, AMINA Bank, the Solana Foundation, APEX:E3, and the Cardano Foundation, with TensorX's Marcus Maute as lead author.
What the Agentic Finance Report covers
The report describes a five-layer stack for running agents over institutional money, and each layer is written by the company building it. AMINA Bank covers regulated custody, the Solana Foundation covers execution, TensorX covers inference, APEX:E3 covers orchestration, and the Cardano Foundation covers identity. Guest chapters from Blindsight and CV VC cover prompt injection and early-stage venture.
Maute sorts the agents themselves into five classes.
Treasury agent. Sweeps surplus cash into tokenized money-market funds and back
Yield agent. Manages tokenized fixed income inside limits a person set
Compliance agent. Approves or rejects every instruction the other agents propose
Collateral agent. Moves pledged assets across prime brokerage, repo, and lending relationships
Payments agent. Settles onchain, from large transfers down to micropayments
The report splits authority into three tiers. Agents act alone on cash sweeps and routine payments, propose and wait for a person on large allocation shifts, and stay out of mandate design entirely.
Measured onchain agent settlement came to about $73M across roughly 176 million transactions in the twelve months to April 2026, according to a Keyrock figure the report cites. Most of those payments were between one and ten cents. The report reads the transaction count as support for its argument and says the dollar volume isn't there yet.
Why does the report pick Solana?
Rishin Sharma, Head of AI Growth at the Solana Foundation, argues in the report's fourth chapter that settlement inside an agent's decision cycle, sub-cent fees, and x402 make Solana the execution layer for agents running institutional money.
His chapter leans on four sets of numbers:
Settlement speed. Blocks confirm in roughly 400 milliseconds today, and Alpenglow brings finality to around 150. Card networks settle over one to three days.
Stablecoin velocity. Solana holds a modest share of global stablecoin supply and settles a far larger share of transfers, with value moved running into the trillions of dollars a year.
Remittances. Legacy rails charge about 6.5% on a $200 transfer and take three to five business days. Stablecoin transfers settle in seconds, and established remittance businesses now run them in production.
Payment channels. The Foundation's benchmark ran 100,000 wallets through a payment-channel proxy and cleared more than 1 million payments a second, or more than 80 billion in 24 hours, at about $0.0078 per million payments.
Solana payment channels let an agent authorize a spending ceiling once and settle the total in one transaction. The report pairs them with x402, which is now hosted by the Linux Foundation, and most x402 volume already settles on Solana.
Compliance at the token level
The report's most Solana-specific proposal is to enforce compliance inside the token with Token-2022 transfer hooks. A hook lives in the mint configuration, so it applies the same way to a wallet transfer, a program call, and a DeFi route.
Today the application that sends a payment checks it, and it can only vouch for its own side when one agent settles with another. The report's design verifies each agent once. An agent is registered through the Solana Attestation Service and bound to a legal entity through a vLEI, the cryptographically verifiable version of the Legal Entity Identifier that banks and regulators already use to identify companies. The attestation names the audited, version-pinned runtime the agent runs on. A token gated this way can only be held by a verified wallet.
Maute labels this the next layer of the stack and says a companion paper will set out the designs and partners. Regulators in Singapore, the US, the UK, and the EU all issued guidance on AI agents in 2026, and the report reads all four as requiring that an agent be identifiable.
The Agentic Finance Report is betting that institutions will hand agents their idle cash first and widen the mandate from there. That puts the opening for Solana builders at the token, where a transfer hook and an attestation turn a regulated asset into something an agent is allowed to hold.