The Solana Foundation released Solana DvP on Monday, an open-source settlement program that lets financial institutions swap tokenized assets and payments in a single atomic transaction. The code shipped under the MIT license, with JPMorgan providing input on institutional settlement practices during the design stage.
Delivery-versus-payment is the guarantee traditional markets run on: an asset and its payment change hands at the same time, or the trade fails entirely. In today’s system that guarantee comes from a multi-day chain of clearinghouses, depositories and custodians, which ties up client capital while a transaction moves through each hop. On Solana, both legs either settle together or neither takes effect.
How the program is built
The foundation presents the program as a reusable standard rather than another bespoke contract. Institutions get a common API for escrow settlement on the network, so each new product does not require a fresh one-off smart contract. DvP supports SPL Token and Token-2022, including the extensions regulated issuers depend on, such as permanent delegate, pausable tokens and transfer hooks. The foundation said the code has passed external security audits.
Finality is the pitch. Trades resolve in seconds rather than days, which changes what settlement costs a bank because less capital sits parked in the clearing chain. A dollar of trading inventory that used to be dead for one or two business days becomes usable again within a block or two, and for a desk running professional volumes that reclaimed capital compounds across every trade.
Plans for privacy features would let two counterparties keep the terms of a settlement confidential, something regulated desks typically require before they will route flows through public infrastructure. Every trade on a public chain is visible by default, and a bank that publishes its client flow in the mempool would have compliance problems before it had settlement problems. Confidential settlement is likely the difference between a demo and actual production volume.
“Atomic settlement removes counterparty risk that is inherent in traditional finance,” said Catherine Gu, the foundation’s head of product for digital assets. She called DvP a single open standard “with finality in seconds instead of days.”
Rhodel Deslandes, who leads markets digital assets work at JPMorgan, said a shared open standard for atomic delivery of assets is what institutional participants have been waiting for from public chain infrastructure. The bank’s involvement in the design stage matters more than a marketing logo would, because settlement standards live or die on whether the firms that have to use them helped write them.
Institutions are already on Solana
The launch lands on a chain that has collected a fair amount of tokenized institutional business this year. BlackRock launched a tokenized money market fund in August that records ownership on Solana alongside Ethereum, structured to qualify as a reserve asset under the GENIUS Act. Kraken uses Solana to offer tokenized US equities to overseas customers through its xStocks product, and that venue has turned tokenized stocks from an experiment into an actual trading business.
Tokenized equities in particular have forced the settlement question. A trader who buys a tokenized share at 9pm on a Friday has grown used to the on-chain experience of instant everything, and the gap between instant trade and next-day settlement is exactly the friction this program attacks. Solana has emerged as a leading venue for tokenized equity volume, and DvP aims to deepen that lead by giving regulated players a way to settle on-chain that their risk departments can sign off on.
The cost math behind atomic settlement
The economics go after a figure the industry already recognizes. Citi has estimated that Tier 1 banks lose about $346 million a year to collateral sitting idle while trades clear. DTCC and Chainlink ran their first cross-chain repo experiment at Sibos this month, with the same target: the slack in the system created by settlement lag. Atomic settlement is another attempt to reclaim balances that today sit locked while a transaction moves through the plumbing, and the fact that both a public chain and the incumbent utility are chasing it says the prize is real.
The counterparty risk framing is the boldest part of the pitch. In bilateral settlement, a counterparty can take delivery without paying, which is why clearinghouses and their mutualized default funds exist. A program where both legs settle or neither does removes that failure mode by design, though only if enough institutions actually route their trades through it. Until volume arrives, the guarantee is theoretical.
Adoption is the open question
Banks weigh seconds of finality against decades of accumulated operational knowledge about the existing system, and the incumbent model has survived every crisis those decades contain. The MIT license makes forking the code cheap, but certification, audit sign-off and internal approvals are where the months actually go. A standard shown in October rarely shows up in a bank’s production flows before the following year, which is roughly how fast the existing tokenization pilots have moved.
Competition frames the rest of it. Ethereum still holds most of the tokenized treasury business, and DTCC owns the plumbing the system actually uses today, so the race here is for the next group of banks choosing chains rather than the current one. The foundation’s argument is on record: a public chain can offer traditional settlement guarantees on compressed timelines, and institutions can now test that claim with code instead of taking it on faith.
Timing is not accidental either. Bitcoin trades near $85,600, about a third below last October’s record, and US spot bitcoin ETFs logged another $90 million in outflows on Monday after $172 million in leveraged positions were liquidated across the market in a day. Solana’s institutional push reads as a bet that the next wave of allocation decisions happens on settlement quality and on what institutions can build, not on the current direction of the price chart. The foundation is building for the cycle after the one the price feeds are arguing about.
Solana’s institutional file now includes the BlackRock fund, Kraken’s tokenized equities and this settlement layer, and each addition makes the next conversation with a bank’s operations committee slightly easier. The settlement window conventionally measured in days is the thing being attacked, and the first mover with an audited standard gets to shape whatever the incumbent counteroffer looks like. Whether banks actually show up with volume is the number to watch next quarter.