Solana lands Mastercard, Western Union on new dev platform

Solana is aiming to attract enterprises and financial institutions to its ecosystem through a new unified developer platform, which is focused on tokenization and stablecoins.

The Solana Foundation has revealed it has secured Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union as early users of its newly launched developer platform, as part of ongoing efforts to attract enterprises to build on its blockchain. 

The Solana Developer Platform (SDP) was announced on Tuesday to enable enterprise developers to build on the blockchain using a unified interface. 

Much of the focus is on real-world asset tokenization, including stablecoins, which is currently a $328 billion market, according to rwa.xyz. More than half of the total value is held on Ethereum; however, with Solana holding 6.3% share of the tokenized real-world asset market.

“The early interest we’ve seen from enterprises and institutions signals strong demand,” said Catherine Gu, the head of product at the Solana Foundation. 

The SDP will initially have three core modules: an issuance module to deploy tokenized real-world assets, a payments module to facilitate fiat and stablecoin flows, and a trading module due later this year that will support atomic swaps, vaults, and onchain forex.

Early users of the SDP include Mastercard for stablecoin settlement, Worldpay for merchant payments and settlement, and Western Union for cross-border payments, said the Solana Foundation. 

Solana invested in making the network enterprise-ready on a technical level with the Alpenglow upgrade in 2025, boosting transaction throughput. Meanwhile, in December, Visa launched USDC (USDC) settlement for US banks on the Solana blockchain.

“The next phase of digital asset innovation will be defined by practical use cases that integrate seamlessly with existing financial systems,” said Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president, blockchain and digital assets, at Mastercard. 

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Meanwhile, Malcolm Clarke, vice president of digital assets at Western Union, said the SDP is “not a replacement for our network,” but allows it to expand use cases and bring more cross-border activity.

Enterprise-grade blockchain solutions are not new, and Solana’s latest platform enters a crowded market. 

The Ethereum ecosystem has several strong offerings targeting the same enterprise audience, including Consensys’ Infura, a scalable API infrastructure powering thousands of decentralized applications.

Consensys also has the Linea layer-2, which is positioning itself as an institutional on-ramp to crypto.  

Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 platform Base has modular components for checkout, APIs, and commerce payments that directly compete with SDP's payments module.

Meanwhile, Ripple’s blockchain offerings, such as XRP Ledger, also primarily target enterprise and financial institutions, as it aims to become the standard for cross-border payments. 

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Source: CoinTelegraph