How Crypto is Building New Capital Markets for Everyone, not just Wall Street
Summary
This session at SXSW 2026 features a wide-ranging conversation between Rodolfo Gonzalez, a partner at Foundation Capital who led the firm's seed investment in Solana in 2018, and Pedro Miranda, Head of Consumer at the Solana Foundation. Together they explore how crypto infrastructure — originally built for speculation — has quietly matured into a foundation for new capital market participation by everyday users, creators, and small businesses.
The discussion opens with prediction markets, which both speakers see as far more than politics and sports betting. Miranda explains that Solana already powers Kalshi's only on-chain crypto product, and highlights the composability it enables: collateralizing positions, fractionalizing them, and applying leverage to adjust risk profiles. He argues the more exciting frontier is user-generated and institutionally-relevant risk contracts — from hedging whether a friend will show up to a bachelor party, to speculating on specific line items in a company's income statement (e.g., whether iced matcha will be a meaningful revenue driver for a consumer brand). He credits the recent regulatory shift — particularly the CFTC's request for public comment on on-chain prediction markets — with enabling founders to experiment on U.S. soil again rather than building in offshore legal structures. Gonzalez adds that Foundation Capital sees the travel sector as a particularly compelling near-term category for prediction markets given the scale of the industry, the financial commitment involved in flights, and the range of variables (weather, delays, status programs) that lend themselves to hedging.
On stablecoins and payments, Gonzalez outlines Foundation Capital's long-held thesis that Tether and Circle will not be the only stablecoin winners. He describes an investment in a company called Braille that lets anyone launch a branded stablecoin with no upfront capital, and sketches a vision where small business owners replace Square, Stripe, and eight separate payment providers with a single crypto-native financial suite — payments, payroll, loyalty, and yield distribution — at roughly one-hundredth the cost of traditional payment processing. Both speakers discuss the "buy now, pay never" concept being explored on Solana, where a consumer's funds are placed in a yield-bearing contract (earning 7–9% via Solana staking), and that yield covers the cost of a purchase over time. The Drip House example illustrates the creator economy angle: the platform enabled 5-cent microtransactions from fans to creators — impossible on Patreon with its $5 minimum — before its acquisition by Jupiter.
On NFTs and memecoins, Miranda pushes back on narratives that both are dead. He points to Solana generating more royalties for artists than any other chain, fine art platform Exchange Art, and the Graveyard Hackathon — which attracted record participation from artists and developers despite being themed around "dead" crypto concepts. On memecoins, he highlights Pudgy Penguins as a model for cryptonative IP: over 500,000 token holders at any denomination, using the token to fund films, toys, events, and a growing collector base with network effects. The speakers acknowledge that crypto's 24/7 nature drives burnout and cyclical waves of talent, but argue that bear markets and reduced attention are historically Solana's most productive periods — the network launched during COVID and built through the FTX collapse.
The session closes with an extended discussion of AI and agentic commerce. Miranda describes a Solana hackathon open only to AI agents, where agents submitted PRs to each other's codebases, spawning spontaneous human collaborations among people who had never met. He sees AI agents choosing Solana because it offers the cheapest, most censorship-resistant, and most composable infrastructure — agents need to trust that their assets won't be seized by a corporate chain serving shareholder interests. Both speakers discuss the shift from ad-supported to transaction-fee-supported business models as AI agents become the primary interface for commerce, and the implications of moving from human-readable UIs to API-native interactions. Practical examples include dupe.com, an AI shopping agent that executes purchases on a user's behalf when prices hit a specified threshold, and Collector, a collectibles platform offering Gmail-based wallet setup with no seed phrase.
Key Takeaways
- •Prediction markets are not limited to politics and sports — compelling near-term categories include travel (hedging flight delays and cancellations), user-generated social markets (e.g., will a friend attend an event), and institutional risk contracts tied to specific line items on a company's balance sheet.
- •Solana powers Kalshi's only on-chain crypto product, enabling composable features on top of prediction positions: collateralization, fractionalization, leverage, and risk-profile adjustment — all without a central counterparty.
- •The CFTC's request for public comment on on-chain prediction markets signals meaningful regulatory openness; founders who previously built offshore in opaque legal structures are now returning to build in the U.S.
- •Foundation Capital invested in Braille, a platform that lets any business or creator launch a branded stablecoin with no upfront capital — enabling small businesses to pass yield to customers, juice loyalty programs, and participate in coordinated merchant stablecoin networks.
- •Running payment volume through Solana instead of traditional processors (which charge 3–5%) could increase small business margins by 3–5x; agentic and stablecoin-native financial suites could replace eight separate providers (Square, Stripe, payroll, etc.) at roughly 1/100th the cost.
- •The 'buy now, pay never' model places consumer funds in a yield-bearing Solana staking contract (earning 7–9% APY) that gradually pays off purchases — a new economic model being piloted with merchants accepting SOL or stablecoins.
- •Drip House (acquired by Jupiter) enabled 5-cent fan-to-creator microtransactions on Solana — impossible on Patreon with its $5 minimum — demonstrating the long tail of economic activity that permissionless micropayments unlock.
- •Solana generates more programmatic royalties for artists than any other chain; fine art platform Exchange Art serves traditional art world figures who use crypto specifically to ensure they get paid on secondary sales and know their collectors.
Transcript
Hello. Hello. Hi everyone. How are you? This is actually great with the hat. >> Yeah, it is very bright. >> Aggressive lighting. Uh, how are you doing? >> I'm good. It's excited to be here at South by Southwest and in Austin. It's been a great time so far. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, thank you all for being here. Um this is the second year in a row that I've had the opportunity uh thanks to the Southby uh team to talk about different aspects of the crypto uh ecosystem. Uh last year we had a pretty ...
