Solana brings instant trade settlement down from 1–2 days to seconds

Wall Street’s settlement process has barely changed in decades: a trade happens, and then everyone waits one or two days for cash and assets to actually change hands. On Oct. 6, the Solana Foundation said it wants to compress that wait into seconds with a new program built for instant trade settlement between financial institutions, developed with input from JPMorgan.

Key takeaways

• Solana Foundation launched Solana DvP, an open-source settlement tool, on Oct. 6.
• Trades settle atomically on-chain, reaching finality in seconds instead of the usual one to two days.
• JPMorgan shared decades of settlement expertise but did not build or operate the program.
• An external audit by Cantina found four medium-risk issues, all of which were fixed before launch.
• Privacy features for confidential settlement are planned but not yet part of the program.

Solana Foundation launches Solana DvP for instant trade settlement

Solana DvP is an open-source delivery-versus-payment program released under the MIT license. It lets institutions settle both sides of a trade, the asset and the payment, in a single atomic blockchain transaction. Either the whole trade goes through, or none of it does.

Catherine Gu, head of product for Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation, said atomic settlement removes counterparty risk that is inherent in traditional finance. “Solana DvP program provides institutions with one open standard across the Solana ecosystem, on public infrastructure, with finality in seconds instead of days,” Gu said in a press release.

Behind the scenes, every trade relies on two separate escrow accounts—one holding the asset and one holding the payment—and a designated settlement authority approves the transaction only after both accounts are funded. Deadlines can be written directly into a trade, and the program will reject settlement outside that window.

Why traditional settlement creates risk institutions want to avoid

In traditional markets, finalizing a deal usually requires assets and cash to move through a sequence of clearinghouses and custodians, a process that can take one to two days. That delay ties up capital and opens the door to principal risk, the chance that one party hands over its side of the trade and the other fails to deliver.

Solana DvP is built to close that gap. Because both legs of a trade settle inside one atomic transaction, there is no window where one counterparty holds the asset or the cash without the other side having delivered. The trade completes in full instantly, or it simply does not happen.

The design also does away with the one-off smart contracts institutions have had to commission for each individual deal when settling tokenized trades on public blockchains, replacing that patchwork with a single, reusable standard.

JPMorgan’s role and the technical details behind the settlement program

Rather than developing the system itself, JPMorgan focused on contributing insights about settlement practices and requirements. According to Rhodel D’souza, head of markets digital assets at J.P. Morgan, a shared, open standard for atomic delivery-versus-payment represents exactly the type of foundational infrastructure that institutional market participants require to operate at scale while avoiding settlement risk and counterparty exposure. “We were pleased to contribute our settlement expertise,” D’souza said.

These contributions informed requirements covering deadlines, escrow isolation, and token extensions—such as pausable tokens and transfer hooks—that regulated issuers depend on under Solana’s upgraded Token-2022 standard. Pausable tokens give administrators an emergency-stop mechanism to freeze transfers when necessary. The program also still supports the original SPL Token standard, letting a single trade combine assets issued under either system.

JPMorgan already has related experience: its Kinexys infrastructure previously tested a cross-chain delivery-versus-payment trade with Ondo Finance, connecting its permissioned payments network with a public blockchain testnet. ClearToken has separately launched its own DvP settlement running on the privacy-enabled Canton Network, though through permissioned applications rather than open public infrastructure.

According to the Solana Foundation, the DvP program has cleared external security audits and is ready for deployment with real funds. An external review identified several issues, including four categorized as medium risk, and all of them were fixed before the public launch. The Foundation said privacy features are planned so that settlements can eventually stay confidential, an area institutions at Consensus Hong Kong earlier this year flagged as key to wider adoption of blockchain technology.

Article produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the editorial team.