The Solana Foundation has unveiled the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), a unified interface designed to help enterprise developers build on the Solana blockchain. The announcement came on Tuesday and is part of a broader push to attract large institutions to the network. Among the first confirmed users are Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union, each deploying the platform for distinct financial use cases.
The SDP is structured around three core modules at launch. The first is an issuance module for deploying tokenized real-world assets, the second is a payments module to handle both fiat and stablecoin flows, and the third is a trading module expected later this year that will support atomic swaps, vaults, and onchain foreign exchange. Much of the platform’s focus centers on real-world asset tokenization, a market currently valued at $328 billion according to rwa.xyz.
Mastercard is using the SDP for stablecoin settlement, Worldpay for merchant payments and settlement, and Western Union for cross-border payments. Catherine Gu, head of product at the Solana Foundation, said the early interest from enterprises and institutions signals strong demand for the platform. Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of blockchain and digital assets at Mastercard, stated that 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, described the SDP as an expansion tool rather than a replacement for the company’s existing network. He said it allows Western Union to broaden its use cases and bring more cross-border activity onto the blockchain. The comments suggest enterprises view the platform as complementary to their current infrastructure rather than a wholesale shift in operations.
Solana has made technical investments to support enterprise adoption, including the Alpenglow upgrade in 2025, which was aimed at boosting transaction throughput. Additionally, Visa launched USDC settlement for US banks on the Solana blockchain in December. The tokenized real-world asset market on Solana currently represents a 6.3% share, while Ethereum holds more than half of the total value in that space.
The SDP enters a competitive market with several established players targeting enterprise blockchain adoption. Within the Ethereum ecosystem, Consensys offers Infura, a scalable API infrastructure used by thousands of decentralized applications, as well as the Linea layer-2 network, which is positioning itself as an institutional entry point into crypto. Coinbase‘s Ethereum layer-2 platform Base also offers modular components for checkout, APIs, and commerce payments that overlap directly with the SDP’s payments module.
Ripple‘s blockchain products, including the XRP Ledger, similarly target enterprise clients and financial institutions with a focus on cross-border payment infrastructure. The range of competing offerings underscores how contested the enterprise blockchain space has become. Solana’s ability to differentiate the SDP will likely depend on the depth of its institutional partnerships and the performance of its network under enterprise-scale demand.
Originally reported by CoinTelegraph.
