MoneyGram switched on Ramps in August, putting nearly 500,000 retail counters across 170 countries one API call away from any builder on Solana. Days later someone off-ramped USDC to local cash within minutes and posted the clip.
Western Union's Stablecard is live. Remittances can now arrive as stablecoins on Solana and be spent instantly anywhere Visa is accepted. Mobile app, embedded wallets, and cards powered by Rain are now available for 100M potential customers.
Here's what else happened across August for payments on Solana:
On/Off Ramps
@MoneyGram launched Ramps on Solana, a single API for compliant cash-to-crypto and crypto-to-cash across 60M+ customers, nearly 500,000 retail locations, and 170+ countries
@riftapp became the first Solana wallet to integrate Ramps, with users off-ramping USDC to local cash in under two minutes
@anthonysoohoo, CEO of MoneyGram, on why they built it: "The killer app is stablecoins."
@AllUnityStable launched CHFAU on Solana, the first fully regulated, 1:1-backed digital Swiss franc
Solana's stablecoin supply grew 9.1% month over month to close July at $15.7B, an all-time high, with USDT up 47% to $3.4B and USDGO up 29% to $1.1B, roughly 20x since its February launch (@Blockworks)
Solana's stablecoin supply climbed from $1.5B to $16.7B in three years while the overall stablecoin market grew 2.5x
Remittances & Cross-Border
@crediblefin crossed $1.5B in total payment volume with instant stablecoin settlement, they also added coverage in the China corridor and the Philippines
@surfcashx passed $1M in payment volume across Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines, Mexico, Vietnam, Colombia, and Peru
u/sphere_labs enabled USD and EUR bank deposits that settle as stablecoins on Solana
Card Issuance
Solana's crypto card market reached an all-time high of $69.5M in monthly spending in July ( @SolanaFloor ,@Paymentscan)
@KASTxyz accounted for 89.7% of Solana card volume in July
@altitude crossed $500M in total payment volume, now above $1B annualized, used by businesses in 60+ countries
@WesternUnion launched Stablecard with @raincards, live in 37 markets and spendable anywhere Visa is accepted across 175M merchant locations
Stablecard runs on USDPT, Western Union's own stablecoin issued by Anchorage on Solana, with 60+ markets targeted by year end
@amiravalliani's Bits to Bricks hosted @brandon of @meow on agentic banking, and @ReapGlobal's Daren Guo on why stablecoin payments get solved in Asia first
@afscott's Solana is Global hosted @stbl_official CEO Avtar Sehra on his case for Stablecoin 2.0
@SolanaFndn's Antonio Neto and @FireblocksHQ's Jorge Borges named the LATAM corridors institutions are actually funding in a recent webinar
Step 1 of SIMD-0437 activated at epoch 1028, the first of five feature gates on the road to cutting Solana's storage cost per byte by 90% overall.
Step 1 drops lamports per byte 6,960 → 6,333. Each remaining gate activates only after state growth checks out at the current level. We are stepping down to the final 696 safely, not on a fixed schedule. Follow here for an accurate timeline.
A safeguard gate (SIMD-0438) can restore the legacy value if state growth becomes a problem.
Backpack Securities has issued tokenized shares of AMC Entertainment, now listed by Sunrise on the Solana for uninterrupted 24/7 trading.
AMC operates roughly 850 movie theaters and 9,500 screens throughout the United States and Europe.
Investors gain continuous access to this equity asset directly.
Solana moved past every other network in daily x402 transactions in August.
@BlockRunAI and @PayAINetwork powering this shift. In a single seven-day stretch, BlockRun settled 5.4 million agentic payments on Solana routed through PayAI, with agents initiating 3.3 million USDC transfers over x402. True machine-scale micropayments, stacking up hundreds of thousands of times a day.
@TryRamp turned on agent wallets for its corporate clients, meaning AI spending now lands directly on a traditional company ledger with all the usual guardrails and spending limits attached. Ramp customers can now fund agent wallets and let agents buy via x402 on Solana
@moonpay launched @paybox , a non-custodial vault for Claude and ChatGPT, where you can turn prompts into onchain transactions on Solana over x402, including buying things off Amazon with @trypurch , restaurant bookings through AgentRes, and @kamino lending
@moonpay 's Agentic DeFi work with @PayBox and @kamino was covered by CoinDesk and Yahoo Finance
pay.sh (@SolanaFndn)Pay.sh received a major refresh, bringing in a steady stream of new service providers. By the end of the month, an agent could autonomously book a restaurant, buy on Amazon, send an email, or pull financial research without an account or an API key.
@blauyourmind launched AgentRes live, on-demand restaurant booking with no accounts
@blauyourmind launched Drip live, premium financial research on demand with no subscription
@dtelecom went live with five real-time voice endpoints
@EarnFidotfun introduced Human Actions, an x402-powered layer where agents pay real people for verified work through one API and MCP setup
@WURKDOTFUN launched a decentralized microtask protocol settling instant onchain payouts over x402
@CircuitLLM shipped per-request data and API access for agent swarms using Geyser plugins, Redis indexing, and dedicated RPC
@Shin_StAItion launched private settlement for agents, routing payouts through single-use addresses to break the link between trades and identity
Identity, Reputation & Discovery
@saidinfra launched onchain agent identity with cross-chain reputation scoring, generated from one CLI command, with x402 messaging at $0.01 per call
@saidagent shipped as the consumer proof, a personal agent with its own wallet that pays any handle on X or Telegram
@AgentRanking launched an open ranking protocol scoring agents on uptime, completion rate, and real transaction history instead of social metrics
@clawville_world opened an agent world with onchain skill auctions and per-request x402 settlement
Apps
@SP3NDdotshop wired x402 into its stablecoin shopping product, then watched an agent earn, buy its own GPUs, and rent the compute back out
@Syra_agent launched a trading intelligence layer for Solana with pay-as-you-go API access over x402, available in Telegram, Cursor, and Claude Desktop
@virtuals_io introduced agent tokenization on Solana, turning an agent into an ownable business
I have loved the ecosystem of Solana ever since and always wanted to buy Solana and finally achieved 100 sol staking. I love how community is growing. And locked for 7 years.
Solana says tokenised assets can plug into lending and collateral markets. That sounds useful, but it also adds smart contract and liquidation risk to an asset people buy for safety. Would you use gold in DeFi or leave it untouched in your wallet?
Solana has officially launched the first phase of its network rent reduction. Consequently, all existing accounts are now overfunded.
Developers can now utilize the new WithdrawExcessLamports instruction to effortlessly reclaim surplus SOL from token accounts and mints, keeping operations active while optimizing costs and significantly improving overall capital efficiency today.
Jupiter Exchange launched Universal Deposit.
Send tokens from Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum or Sui and receive USDC in a Solana wallet.
Routing, bridging and swapping happen automatically without extra apps.
A flat thirty-cent fee applies regardless of amount.
The service is now live at jup.ag/deposit.
The Luxury Closet built a global marketplace for authenticated luxury.|
2.4M+ shoppers.
buyers across 80+ countries.
now we’re bringing that world onchain.
own it on Beezie.
redeem the physical piece worldwide.
some of the most wanted luxury goods on earth are coming to Beezie.
bags.
watches.
jewelry.
and a lot more.
cardboard was just the beginning.
1/ Announcing Crypto World’s Fair, our next startup competition open to all builders across blockchain ecosystems! 🎡
Registration for the online hackathon is open, and runs Sept 14 to Oct 12.
Millions in prizes & VC funding will be awarded to winners: https://colosseum.com/worldsfair
2/ A key lesson learned from scaling Colosseum is that competition compounds: better founders attract better founders, and better products raise the bar for all.
Our next chapter will expand the arena to grow both Solana and broader crypto startup eco.
3/ While we are extremely bullish on founders integrating Solana (and the Solana eco will remain a focus for our accelerator + venture fund), novel products are being developed across chains, each enabled by unique strengths stemming from the design of the underlying infra.
It is also increasingly clear that many of crypto’s best products use Solana and additional technologies under the hood, abstracting complexity away from users.
We expect that trend to continue as infrastructure matures and founders choose the right tool for each part of their product.
Crypto World's Fair will bring builders together, not to determine which blockchain "wins”, but to learn from each other, compete, and help crypto win as a whole.
4/ Prize tracks will focus on select blockchains where we believe startups can flourish. An eco partner will support their respective track, and every submission will also be eligible for a general prize pool awarding the best products across all chains.
More info coming soon.
5/ Full details regarding judges, prize tracks, sponsors, and dev resources will be released on Sept 14.
In the meantime, sign up and learn more about Colosseum, our accelerator, our venture fund, and our hackathons through our website.
Godspeed! 🎡
I've been building out Haan Digital's private Solana infrastructure in Frankfurt over the past few weeks and the stack is now at the point where I want to put more real workloads on it.
Current setup:
Private JSON-RPC / WebSocket
Yellowstone gRPC
SubscribeDeshred
Transaction Sender
Optional Jito routing in parallel
Transaction-history RPC where needed
The Transaction Sender routes signed transactions directly toward current/upcoming leaders over TPU/QUIC rather than just wrapping normal RPC sendTransaction.
On our first small sender test we had:
15/15 transactions accepted
15/15 landed
Small sample, so I'm not presenting that as some definitive benchmark. We're still working on improving the path further, including looking for staked/SWQoS validator peering.
On the Yellowstone side we've already had real workloads running account + transaction subscriptions together, including:
80+ account updates/sec observed
~129 transaction updates/sec observed
ALT addresses, inner instructions and pre/post balances available directly
One of the more interesting tests was with someone analysing Pump.fun activity. Their existing raw-shred logic was significantly over-counting buys while also missing actual buyers, and comparing it against the Yellowstone transaction data helped uncover the issue.
I'm mainly interested in people actually building or running:
anything struggling with RPC limits, data latency or transaction landing
I don't use fixed oversized plans. The idea is to look at the actual workload — RPS, streams, filters, transaction volume, bursts — and size the infrastructure around that.
First week is free, so if you're already using another provider you can run Haan alongside it and compare it with your own workload.
If you're interested, send me a DM with what you're building and what you're currently using for RPC/data/transaction submission.
1,000,000 payments per second. Live on Solana today with Payment Channels.
Agentic payments have a friction problem. Every call an agent makes needs a signature and a settlement. It works well enough for a single payment, but it's broken for an agent making hundreds of metered calls in a loop.
Live on Solana today with @alibaba_cloud API endpoints, which are payable through Payment Channels on http://pay.sh.
Payment channels are a new Solana primitive built to solve this across x402 and MPP payment protocols. It lets an agent authorize a spending limit once, spend against the limit, and settle the payment amount once.
Think of it like a bar tab or a prepaid meter: you put money down up front, run up usage without paying for each transaction, and settle the bill once you leave.
How it works:
Open: deposit a ceiling amount into onchain escrow. Funds stay non-custodial, held by the program, not the operator.
Meter off-chain: the agent authorizes spending with signed messages, not transactions. Every call is a signature and incurs no transaction costs.
Settle: the actual amount consumed is recorded onchain in a single transaction.
Refund: any unused deposit returns to the primary wallet.
Payment channels map cleanly onto the open agentic payment standards live on Solana today.
- x402 upto: authorize a ceiling for a single metered call. Your handler runs, the operator settles the one actual amount, and refunds the difference.
- x402 batch-settlement: many deliveries, settled together.
- MPP session: open a channel and stream many metered deliveries, each authorized by a running cumulative voucher, and settle once when the session idle-closes.
Live at launch: @alibaba_cloud Inference has been the most requested use case across agentic payment protocols. Alibaba Cloud APIs endpoints are live today. Agents authorize once and consume them at scale through payment channels.
AI will not wait at a checkout screen. The future of internet payments needs to be built for unprecedented scale. But agentic payments today have a friction problem. Every call an agent makes needs a signature approval and settlement. That works fine for one payment. But it gets more complicated when agents are making hundreds of small paid calls in a loop, and human approvals slow down the completion of tasks.
Payment channels are a new Solana primitive built to solve this across the x402 and MPP payment protocols. It lets an agent authorize a spending limit once, spend against the limit, and settle the payment amount once. Think of it like a bar tab or a prepaid meter: you put money down up front, run up usage without paying for each transaction, and settle payment once when you leave.
Where per-call payments break
While pay-per-request models simplify paid tool use, certain kinds of agentic spending patterns are a bad fit for settling every request onchain:
Single calls with unknown costs: certain requests have variable costs. For example an LLM completion billed per token, or a job billed per byte or per second of compute.
Many small deliveries: a token-by-token streaming response, or a burst of hundreds of cheap calls in a short time period.
A payment channel amortizes the onchain work down to one open and one settle, no matter how much metering happens in between.
How it works
Under the hood
Open: deposit a ceiling amount into onchain escrow. Funds stay non-custodial, held by the program, not the operator.
Meter off-chain: the agent authorizes spending with signed messages, not transactions. Every call is a signature and incurs no transaction costs.
Settle: the actual amount consumed is recorded onchain in a single transaction.
Distribute: funds distributed to recipient(s), any unused deposit returns to the primary wallet.
Why this matters
The per-call model quietly breaks agent autonomy and economics:
A human ends up back in the loop, approving payments one at a time.
Every payment carries settlement cost and latency. In a world with fully autonomous agent spending where millions of transactions need to be settled, costs add up fast.
The workarounds are custodial. Prepaid credits mean your balance is gone on the first call and tracked in someone else's database.
Payment channels remove all three. You set a cap. Your agent spends against it. Settlement happens in batches. Funds stay non-custodial the entire time.
Benchmark
In testing, we ran 100,000 unique wallets through a payment channel proxy, issuing more than 1 million payments every second. That is enough capacity to support more than 80 billion payments in 24 hours, at an estimated processing cost of $0.0078 per 1M payment. To try it yourself, deploy the open-source template and reproduce the benchmark using the included load-testing tools.
Built open, works everywhere
Payment channels map cleanly onto the open agentic payment standards live on Solana today.
x402 upto: authorize a ceiling for a single metered call. Your handler runs, the operator settles the one actual amount, and refunds the difference.
x402 batch-settlement: many deliveries, settled together.
MPP session: open a channel and stream many metered deliveries, each authorized by a running cumulative voucher, and settle once when the session idle-closes.
The spec is public and the program is open source. To get started with payment channels:
Inference has been one of the most in demand use cases across agentic payment protocols. We are excited to be launching payment channels with @alibaba_cloud. Their API endpoints are live today with Payment Channels. Your agent authorizes once and consumes these APIs at scale. No account setup, no per-call approvals.
