Solana Announces Institutional Settlement Program Aiming to Cut Capital Lockup from Two Days to Seconds
Key Facts
On 6 October 2026, the Solana Foundation announced Solana DvP, an open-source program for settling delivery-versus-payment trades through an on-chain API. The program combines the two legs of a trade, the asset and cash, in a single atomic transaction, so they either move together or neither moves. The foundation said the traditional settlement process ties up capital for one to two days, while the program is designed to achieve final settlement within seconds. The foundation presents the tool as infrastructure built for institutions, not as a service shown to have been used in production trading. Its announcement invited design partners and early participants ahead of a production release, despite saying the program is ready for use with real money.
According to the announcement, the design relies on an isolated escrow and enforced deadlines to complete both legs together. If the asset and cash do not move under the terms, neither leg settles, tying completion of both sides of the trade to the same transaction. Solana’s documentation says a settlement authority specified in the trade, a third address, executes both legs in one transaction. The tool supports the SPL Token and Token-2022 standards, with extensions that include permanent delegation, pausing tokens and transfer hooks. The foundation says these extensions meet the needs of regulated issuers and describes the program as upgradeable.
The foundation’s announcement said J.P. Morgan’s involvement was limited to providing input on securities settlement practices and institutional requirements. The foundation did not describe the bank as the program’s developer, operator or an entity that had approved it. It said a bank, custodian or exchange could serve as an example of a settlement agent, while the settlement authority specified in the trade executes both legs. The foundation said the program had passed external security audits and was ready for use with real money. But it also invited design partners and early users ahead of a production release, making that invitation part of the announced next steps.
The announcement comes as tokenized equity activity on Solana expands, according to data cited by DeFi Development Corp in its second-quarter shareholder letter filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said the network processed $6.5 billion in tokenized equity trading volume in June 2026, 254 times the amount in June 2025. The letter added that about 96% of cumulative spot trading volume in tokenized equities had settled on Solana as of 12 August 2026. These figures measure trading activity on the network and do not measure use of Solana DvP itself. In the broader context of tokenized assets, the Solana Foundation said the value of non-stablecoin real-world assets on the network reached $3.7 billion across 313,000 holders in late July 2026.
On a parallel regulatory track, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on 17 September 2026 issued a temporary, conditional exemption for eligible tokenized securities trading platforms and eligible liquidity providers. The order allows those entities to trade tokenized NMS stocks through automated market makers and permissioned liquidity pools, subject to the exemption’s terms. The conditions include that the smart contracts used be auditable, public and published on a public, permissionless distributed ledger. The platform must also halt trading in the tokenized stock at the same time as trading in the underlying stock is halted. The exemptions expire five years after publication of the order, on which the commission sought public comment on potential amendments and next steps.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced progress on its institutional asset-tokenization effort. On 4 May 2026, it said its service design was being developed with more than 50 financial firms and that its depository subsidiary held assets worth more than $114 trillion. It later reported that more than 30 firms had taken part in production trading in DTC-tokenized assets on 15 July 2026, including collateral pledging, securities lending and Treasury and equity settlement on a delivery-versus-payment basis. DTCC said the service is planned to launch in October 2026, while its FAQ page expects availability in the fourth quarter of the year. The eligible asset set includes equities, exchange-traded funds and U.S. Treasuries, with portfolio registration and connectivity to Canton Network and Hyperledger Besu expected at launch; Solana, meanwhile, says it plans to add privacy to DvP without specifying a timeline.