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Solana Foundation and Google Cloud are teaming up for a hackathon in Korea focused on building AI agents that can make autonomous payments. The collaboration sits at the intersection of AI and stablecoins, backed by enterprise infrastructure from both organizations.
The event builds on an increasingly tight relationship between the two organizations, one that recently produced Pay.sh, an API proxy designed to let AI agents autonomously pay for Google Cloud services using stablecoin micropayments on the Solana blockchain.
What Pay.sh actually does
Pay.sh sits between AI agents and Google Cloud’s suite of services, including Gemini, BigQuery, and Cloud Run, letting those agents discover, authenticate, and transact for API access without a human ever stepping in.
In English: an AI agent needs to run a query on BigQuery. Instead of requiring someone to log in, enter a credit card, and approve the charge, Pay.sh lets the agent pay for exactly what it uses with USDC on Solana. Pay as you go, no human middleman required.
The system leverages Solana’s high throughput and low transaction costs, which makes micropayments economically viable in a way they simply aren’t on slower, more expensive chains. A fraction-of-a-cent payment for a single API call doesn’t work if the transaction fee costs more than the service itself.
The hackathon ecosystem
The Korean hackathon carries the theme “Build the Future of Agentic Commerce,” and it’s part of a broader push by both organizations to seed developer interest in autonomous agent infrastructure.
It’s not the first time Solana has targeted Korea specifically. In April 2025, Solana Super Team Korea collaborated with Google Cloud for the Seoul Lana Hackathon, establishing a regional footprint that this latest event builds upon.
Running in parallel is the Solana X402 Hackathon, a remote event scheduled from October 28 to November 11, 2025, with a prize pool of $135,000. Participants can earn up to $20,000 per track for projects that support x402 integrations, which is the payment protocol underpinning how agents discover and pay for services autonomously.
Previous Solana hackathons have featured tracks for DeFi agents and token tooling, with total prizes exceeding $250,000 across events.
Why this matters for the stablecoin economy
The real story isn’t the hackathon itself. It’s what the hackathon is designed to produce: a developer ecosystem around machine-to-machine stablecoin payments.
If AI agents start autonomously consuming cloud services and paying in USDC on Solana, that’s a new source of persistent, programmatic stablecoin velocity. Not speculative trading volume, not one-off remittances, but ongoing commercial activity baked into software architectures.
Solana is positioning itself as the default settlement layer for this economy. Sub-second finality and transaction costs measured in fractions of a penny make it practical for the kind of micropayments that agent commerce requires.
The Google Cloud partnership adds enterprise legitimacy. When a company that controls roughly a third of the global cloud infrastructure market co-signs your payment protocol, it sends a signal to CTOs and procurement teams that this isn’t a science experiment.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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