Welcome to FinTech TV.
The Salana Foundation just announced the official launch of the Salana developer platform.
The SDP is designed as a one-stop shop for enterprises and financial institutions to build and launch financial products on Solana powered entirely by API.
Global heavyweights like Mastercard, Western Union, and WorldPay are already on board as early users.
Joining me here.
At Digital Asset Summit 2026 is Catherine Gu, head of product and digital assets at Salana Foundation.
Catherine, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's great to be in person.
Well, of course, I do want to ask you about this announcement, so tell us about the SDP platform.
Super excited to get this thing coming to life.
Um, it took us about 3 months roughly to build the first version and Um, there's a lot more to come, by the way, but, uh, essentially as we're thinking about the motivation behind SDP is basically lots of financial institutions are very crypto curious and they really want to start testing and iterating on ideas.
Now the problem is, like typically it will take them a very long kind of life cycle for them to even start building anything on chain because of, say, technical understanding and there's a lot of bottlenecks in terms of like navigating different solutions that.
So in order to abstract away a lot of the infrastructure and background complexity, if you will, we created this one single platform that aggregates the best of Solana owing to here.
So what that means is basically we have 20 plus different info providers that make SDP alive.
So you know whether that's coming from the wallet side custody or whether that's coming from the rent side or compliance, we have the underlying infrastructure partners to actually power these services behind the hood.
And also we're showcasing some of the best features on Solana, whether that's a gasless sponsor sponsorship, or whether that's to do with token extension that says you can issue a stablecoin with certain permissioning features embedded and you can customize that.
It's all wrapped around in different forms of API.
So then as an enterprise developer, API is a very familiar playground for them, and we make it as seamless as possible for them to start building very and cycle that idea much, much faster than what they typically would experience.
And amongst some of the early adopters here, some heavyweights have been named.
So tell us what they're building and also what their primary use cases.
Yeah, so, you know, very proud to have 3 major sort of payment companies joining us here.
I think it's actually quite spread out in terms of the use cases they're looking at.
So starting with Mastercard, they're looking at stablecoin settlement as a natural place to begin.
So what that means is really between Mastercard and the issue and Aquarius, they now want to start experiments.
Directly settling at the end of the day, the obligations with one another in stablecoins as opposed to convert it back to fiat.
So for them, they want to test to facilitate the stablecoin settlement directly on Solana through SDP.
Now if you move on to someone like Worldpay, as they're looking at from their acquirer angle, they're more looking at merchant experience.
Related type of use cases.
So that would be like if merchants want to be paid directly in stablecoins and using Solana as the underlying blockchain infrastructure, how do I conduct that and what kind of wallet infrastructure I need to create for my merchant customers for them to use.
So that's Worldpay.
And lastly on Western Union, the huge global remittance provider, they're already actually experimenting on Solana, as you know.
The launch of their own stablecoin, but specifically as we're looking at the collaboration between Western Union and Solana, this actually is a two-way approach.
So on the one hand they want to be a user and leveraging SDP to facilitate a lot of the cross-border flows.
On the other hand, they actually have a new product as well.
It's called.
It's a digital asset Network.
So through this relationship we are actually partnering with them and Western Union become an.
Provider as well through this digital asset network they can allow any customers to have the experience of cash out in fiat, and that's really powerful in the sense we have all these crypto custody infrastructures on SDP.
You as a user, you can trade and do whatever you want with crypto assets.
At some point, maybe you want to off-ramp it and cash out, right?
And this is where Den from the Western Union kicks in because they create that last mile delivery to cash out in fiat.
Yeah, and Catherine, while I have you here, I do want to ask you about modules as well as partnerships.
So what can we expect?
Yeah, so, um, Right now we have 2 out of the 3 modules available.
So on SDP, the core thesis is we want the financial, any financial institutions to test whether it's you're looking at issuing your own stablecoin, issuing a tokenized deposit, or say issuing a real world assets.
You can do that within what we call the issuance module.
So that's number 1.
Number 2 is on payments.
So you can think about that as basically an orchestration platform, right?
Whether that's an on-ramping, off-ramping.
Stablecoin to stablecoin payment experiences, we want to create a very rich ecosystem to do that.
And number 3 that's going to be coming up soon at sometime later this year, I hope, is the trading module.
And what that is basically imagine if some financial institution create a new tokenized asset in the issuance module.
They then want to think about how do I list that new assets on a set of exchanges and how do I then allow, say, retail. customers to start trading that newly issued asset, so we want to enable that end to end flow to happen or there could be another use case to say I want to do treasury management.
So I already created my stablecoin in this issuance module.
Now I want to plug my stablecoin into some yield generating defi permissioning pooling, or curated vaults or whatnot.
So we want that also as a different type of use case to be enabled.
So it's really that end to end.
From issuance all the way to trading, we want to make that available for financial institutions to use.
And one other area I do want to ask you about is artificial intelligence.
So we know that AI gentech commerce is a key theme here at Digital Asset Summit 2026.
So when it comes to SDP, I understand that it is AI ready.
Is that correct?
Absolutely.
So I highlighted we took only 3 months to build this product, not because we Had a massive team of engineers, but we're very good at using AI tooling to make it happen.
And I was very surprised and really proud to just like everything was built from the ground up using AI and also everything is entirely API powered.
So when you're coming into SDP as an enterprise, all you're seeing is APIs, right?
Of course there's a UII there's a user interface to for to ease the navigation, but under the hood everything is entirely API based.
So what that means is as an agent.
LLM agent who comes in and starts adopting SDP all it needs to interact is APIs, and it's a very familiar type of interface in which agents can interact with.
And then on top of that, we also train skills for agents in order to import into their own individual RLMs.
So basically think about the analogies.
We created a memory pool around the SDP.
We give you the basic definition of functionality.
And the know-hows of any for any agent to be like, this is how you can adopt, uh, you know, uh SDP.
So enterprise comes in, they can simply just import that markdown file, import it into their own ROM, and then, you know, give further instruction on top of it to say customize that specific use case.
It becomes a much easier experience because you already have a very rich base of fundamental knowledge imported from that skill.
You can then build on top of it.
Well, Catherine, it was great having you join me as DAS 2026 gets underway.
So thank you so much for sharing the latest regarding SDP.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the show.
Thank you.
