Update (March 25, 3:05 am UTC): This article has been updated to add comments from Catherine Gu.
The Solana Foundation announced a new Solana Developer Platform (SDP) and said Mastercard, Worldpay and Western Union are early users as it seeks to attract enterprises to build on Solana’s blockchain.
SDP provides a unified interface for enterprise developers and focuses on tokenizing real-world assets, including stablecoins—a market estimated at $328 billion, according to rwa.xyz. Ethereum currently holds the largest share of tokenized real-world assets, while Solana holds about 6.3% of that market.
Catherine Gu, head of product at the Solana Foundation, said early enterprise interest signals strong demand. The SDP will launch with three core modules: an issuance module for deploying tokenized real-world assets, a payments module to handle fiat and stablecoin flows, and a trading module planned later this year to support atomic swaps, vaults and on-chain forex.
Solana said Mastercard will use SDP for stablecoin settlement, Worldpay for merchant payments and settlement, and Western Union for cross-border payments.
Gu told Cointelegraph the platform can grow in functionality across all three modules and that the foundation plans to expand infrastructure partners and services available through SDP. She noted an interest in stablecoin-linked cards, calling them a primary stablecoin use case today. Solana’s broader vision is to “power internet capital markets,” enabling assets to trade on-chain with internet speed and ease. “The focus remains on both enterprise and consumer use cases as the ecosystem looks to bring all assets on chain,” she added.
Solana has pursued technical upgrades to make the network more enterprise-ready, including the 2025 Alpenglow upgrade to boost transaction throughput. In December, Visa launched USDC settlement for U.S. banks on Solana.
Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of blockchain and digital assets at Mastercard, said the next phase of digital asset innovation will be defined by practical use cases that integrate with existing financial systems. Malcolm Clarke, vice president of digital assets at Western Union, said SDP is not a replacement for Western Union’s network but enables new use cases and expands cross-border activity.
SDP enters an already crowded market of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions. The Ethereum ecosystem offers mature infrastructure such as Consensys’ Infura and the Linea layer-2, which position themselves for institutional use. Coinbase’s Base provides modular components for checkout, APIs and commerce payments that compete with SDP’s payments module. Ripple’s offerings, including the XRP Ledger, also target enterprises and banks with a focus on cross-border payments.
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