The Solana Foundation has unveiled a new developer platform designed to make it far easier for banks, payment firms and other financial institutions to build on-chain products — and some of the biggest names in payments are already on board. Mastercard, Western Union and Worldpay are among early users testing the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), which is live for developer testing today.
SDP is a toolkit that lets enterprises create and scale financial applications on Solana without needing deep in-house crypto infrastructure expertise. The platform consolidates services from more than 20 infrastructure providers — covering custody, compliance, wallets and payments — into a single interface, aiming to replace the fragmented, multi-vendor stack institutions usually face when moving into crypto.
To speed development, SDP will also integrate AI-assisted coding tools, including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, giving teams familiar developer workflows and productivity boosts while building on-chain features.
At launch, SDP offers two production-ready modules:
- Issuance: enables firms to mint tokenized deposits, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets.
- Payments: supports fiat and stablecoin flows, including on- and off-ramps and on-chain transactions.
A trading module is slated to arrive later in 2026.
The participation of traditional payments giants highlights growing institutional interest in blockchain settlement. Mastercard is exploring stablecoin settlement on Solana, Western Union is testing cross-border payments through the platform, and Worldpay is focused on merchant settlement and tokenized assets.
In a press release shared with CoinDesk, the Solana Foundation framed SDP as an accessible, familiar way for institutions to begin building financial products on Solana, reinforcing the network’s push to be a payments-friendly layer for global finance.
What this means: SDP packages the plumbing institutions need — compliance, custody, rails — while adding AI and developer tooling to lower the barrier to entry. With major payments firms experimenting on Solana, SDP could accelerate real-world rollouts of tokenized deposits, stablecoins and cross-border payment products as the ecosystem matures toward institutional-grade use.
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