Solana Foundation taps Mastercard, Western Union, Worldpay for institutional developer platform

The Solana Foundation is launching a new developer platform aimed at making it easier for financial institutions to build blockchain-based products, with early users including Mastercard, Western Union and Worldpay.

The Solana Developer Platform (SDP), currently available for developers to test, is a toolkit that enables enterprises to create and scale financial applications on Solana without deep crypto infrastructure expertise. The SDP will also integrate AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

The platform bundles services from more than 20 infrastructure providers — spanning custody, compliance, wallets and payments — into a single interface, streamlining what has traditionally been a fragmented process for institutions entering the space.

At launch, SDP includes two live modules. The issuance module enables companies to create tokenized deposits, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, while the payments module supports fiat and stablecoin flows, including on- and off-ramps and onchain transactions. A trading module is expected later in 2026.

The involvement of traditional payments firms underscores growing institutional interest in blockchain-based settlement. Mastercard is exploring stablecoin settlement on Solana, while Western Union is testing cross-border payments on the platform. Worldpay is focusing on merchant settlement and tokenized assets.

“As Solana continues to be the most trusted and innovative infrastructure for payments and financial companies worldwide, SDP provides an accessible and familiar experience for institutions and enterprises to start building products on Solana today,” the Solana Foundation wrote in a press release shared with CoinDesk.