Solana Opens an MIT-Licensed Settlement Program for Institutions

The Solana Foundation published an open-source escrow program on Tuesday that lets a tokenized asset and its payment change hands in the same transaction, or not at all. It is called Solana DvP, after delivery-versus-payment, the settlement convention that has governed securities markets for decades. The code carries an MIT license, so any institution can take it, modify it and run it without paying for the right. J.P. Morgan contributed input on how securities settlement works in practice. The bank's name is on the announcement, and so is a disclaimer that runs unusually long.

Both legs or neither

Settlement is atomic when the two sides of a trade complete together or not at all. In the conventional arrangement a clearinghouse and a custodian sit in between, and the Foundation's post puts the capital tied up in that process at one to two days. Solana DvP compresses it into a single transaction with finality in seconds. Each trade sits in isolated escrow with a deadline attached, so a counterparty that fails to deliver does not leave the other side holding an open obligation.

The program works with SPL Token and Token-2022, the two token standards on the network. Three Token-2022 extensions are named in the announcement: permanent delegate, pausable tokens and transfer hooks. Each preserves a control a regulated issuer may be obliged to keep, such as the ability to freeze a holding or to run a check before a transfer clears.

Where the bank's name stops

Rhodel D'souza, who heads markets digital assets at J.P. Morgan, is quoted in the announcement.

"A shared, open standard for atomic delivery-versus-payment is exactly the kind of foundational infrastructure institutional market participants require to operate at scale without introducing settlement risk and counterparty exposure," D'souza said. "We were pleased to contribute our settlement expertise."

A later passage in the same post is narrower. It says the bank's involvement was limited to input on securities settlement practices, and should not be read as J.P. Morgan designing, developing, operating, approving, certifying, warranting, endorsing or guaranteeing the program or its performance. The wider claim comes from Catherine Gu, the Foundation's head of product for digital assets, who said atomic settlement removes the counterparty risk built into traditional finance and that the program gives institutions one open standard on public infrastructure. Advice and endorsement are different things. The post keeps them apart.

No live trade on the record

The post says the program has undergone external security audits and is ready for real funds. It names no audit firm. It points readers to the Solana Foundation's GitHub account without naming the repository. InvestingLive, covering the launch, reported that no institution had confirmed using Solana DvP for a live trade, and nothing else read here addresses the question either way, so it stands unverified. That same account is alone in dating the announcement to 5 October in New York, while the Foundation's own post and Decrypt's write-up both carry 6 October. The two dates do not reconcile.

Institutional traffic on the network predates this. Decrypt, alone among the accounts read here, points to BlackRock's tokenized money market fund launched on Solana in August and to Kraken's tokenized US stock offerings. InvestingLive adds an earlier case that nothing else corroborates: J.P. Morgan handling delivery-versus-payment for a $50 million tokenized commercial paper issue by Galaxy Digital in December 2025, bought by Coinbase and Franklin Templeton. Tokenized equities already change hands on the network, where one venue opened round-the-clock dealing in real US stocks. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi have meanwhile been building a shared tokenized-deposit network of their own.

The version after this one

The Foundation is looking for design partners and early participants ahead of a production release, and says it plans to add privacy so that settlements can be made confidential. Neither carries a date. A standard only works once more than one party runs it, and as of Tuesday the public record names a single bank, in an advisory role it has gone out of its way to bound.