Welcome back to Solana Sessions, where we explore a founder’s journey building in the Solana ecosystem, and take a look at Solana’s new Developer Platform.

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For businesses, building on a public blockchain has traditionally involved gathering a number of separate providers for every technical requirement. As a solution, Solana Foundation has launched the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), which provides companies and financial institutions the infrastructure, security, compliance, and payments systems needed for building financial products. Early users include Mastercard, Worldpay and Western Union.

At launch, the platform lets institutions issue digital versions of deposits, dollars, and real-world assets like bonds or funds. In addition, it handles moving both traditional currency and digital dollars between businesses and their customers. 

The platform is also built to work with AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, so developers can use these tools to build on SDP without requiring any additional setup.

Solana says SDP aims to make it easier for financial institutions to build on public blockchains: Regulatory compliance is handled through established monitoring firms, and fund custody is covered by vetted providers. This abstracts away the technical complexity of interacting with blockchain tech, which has traditionally deterred or delayed institutions from pursuing solutions on blockchains.

Rather than replacing practices that have been set in place by many financial institutions, SDP is designed to assist in development. “It’s not a replacement for [organizations like Western Union]; it’s a modern extension that helps us innovate faster, expand new use cases, and bring more cross‑border activity onchain in a scalable, compliant way,” said Malcolm Clarke, VP of Digital Assets at Western Union.

For today’s episode, we interviewed Dan Mottice, head of stablecoins at Modern Treasury and founder of Beam, a stablecoin payment platform it acquired in October 2025. Dan, who previously led Visa's crypto products before building Beam, explains how payment infrastructure is evolving to treat stablecoins as a default rail alongside traditional fiat systems.

He walks through why moving money remains hard, how 24/7 liquidity will transform cross-border and domestic payments, and why the layer between fiat and crypto is the real bottleneck. The conversation covers stablecoin clearinghouses as an emerging opportunity, why stablecoin neobanks need to match incumbent features and where value will accrue in the payment stack. Dan also shares lessons from building consumer versus B2B products and his advice for staying focused on the builders who stick around during bear markets.

This episode is a part of the Solana Sessions campaign that Token Relations and the Talking Tokens podcast are doing, diving into founders’ journeys and startups building on Solana. Check out the accompanying podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.