What you’ll learn: How Solana connects fiat, stablecoins, and merchant networks into one fast, low-cost settlement layer.

Why it matters: Institutions now have a clear path from fiat on-ramps to regulated stablecoins and into merchant tools. This enables global payouts, efficient treasury operations, and consumer payments.

Exo Edge: We help teams design and implement these flows. Our experience lies in our connections and our ability to create products suited to our clients ’ needs.

Historically, blockchain payments have been held back by slow settlement, high fees, and limited fiat connectivity. Stablecoins changed the economics. Solana changed the experience. Today, the combination of fast finality, low fees, and mature fiat bridges makes Solana a credible global settlement layer.

This report explains how these components fit together and how institutions can use them to build reliable, production-grade payment flows.

Solana’s payment stack has essentially three layers:

Each layer now has regulated, production-ready providers. The following lists are not exhaustive, but should give a comprehensive overview of the products available. All of which Exo can help you integrate with. If you feel anything is missing, comment where it’s posted!

For an exhaustive list → visit https://solana.com/solanaramp. Also, you can thank Huma Finance for this epic PayFi ecosystem map they put together back in January → https://blog.huma.finance/introducing-the-payfi-ecosystem-map.

Users and businesses need a simple, reliable way to move value from bank accounts into stablecoins on Solana. That early step used to be the most painful, but it has dramatically improved thanks to providers who streamline conversion, KYC, settlement, and compliance.

Consider the following examples.

Solflare, a wallet built specifically for Solana. Institutions may operate through custodial systems, but the users they serve will often engage through consumer wallets like this. The experience those wallets provide ultimately defines how people expect payments, transfers, and stablecoin movement to feel.

Cash App is about to expand the consumer funnel in a major way. Once USDC support goes live, tens of millions of users will be able to buy, hold, and send digital dollars in an interface already familiar to them, creating one of the largest organic USDC on-ramps to Solana.

Sphere Labs handles the complex parts of real-world settlement. They abstract away regulatory mismatches, banking complexities, liquidity conversion, and region-specific payout challenges. Instead of teams building fragmented global payment rails, they can simply plug into a unified infrastructure.

Together, these services form a path from fiat entry to on-chain distribution.

As such, the providers below should be categorized essentially in two camps: Consumer Wallets (like Solflare and Cash App) for user experience, and Infrastructure APIs (like Sphere and Transak) for business logic.

Stablecoins bridge traditional finance and on-chain settlement. Solana now supports several regulated issuers that institutions can rely on.

USDC from Circle remains the institutional anchor. It is fully reserved, transparent in reporting, and deeply integrated into enterprise payment workflows. On Solana, USDC moves at network speed, making it practical for payroll, B2B transfers, vendor payments, and marketplace settlement where execution time matters.

PYUSD, issued by Paxos and distributed through PayPal, extends stablecoins into everyday user contexts. Functionally, it introduces digital dollars to millions of consumers who are not crypto-native. Its deployment on Solana signals the shift toward stablecoin-powered retail payments and microtransactions that require instant finality and reliability.

AUSD from Agora introduces a stablecoin engineered for institutional settlement and capital flows. Fully backed, operationally transparent, and optimized for predictable performance, AUSD adds redundancy and resilience to the stablecoin layer. This diversification reduces concentration risk and expands the options available to enterprises operating on Solana.

After issuance, merchants need simple ways to receive funds. Solana now supports both native and mainstream acceptance options.

Solana Pay enables direct on-chain payments through QR codes, links, and API hooks. Settlement finalizes instantly, fees remain negligible, and merchants can wire it in with minimal backend change. For businesses that already operate digitally, it behaves like a faster Stripe with programmable receipts and atomic settlement.

PYUSD acceptance through PayPal allows merchants to receive stablecoins in a familiar interface. This is ideal for businesses that want the benefits of on-chain dollars without having to maintain wallets, private keys, or blockchain logic in their own stack. They get speed and cost-efficiency, while the crypto layer stays invisible.

MoonPay’s strategy for merchant payments evolved significantly with the acquisition of Helio’s technology in early 2025, which now powers the dedicated MoonPay Commerce platform. This unified platform provides merchants, creators, and developers with all the tools needed to accept crypto payments globally and settle instantly in digital assets or automatically convert to fiat.

Together, these rails create a spectrum of acceptance models. From fully on-chain payments to hybrid systems to complete Web2 interfaces settling on Solana, merchants can choose the level of crypto exposure that best fits their operations.

Together, these options allow merchants to choose how much of the crypto stack they want to see. Some go fully on-chain. Some stay Web2 but settle on Solana. All benefit from faster, cheaper, and more programmable money movement.

Curious about Pyra? Check out the podcast we filmed with him a few months ago. Want to come on the podcast → Reach out to our host Dirt!

Solana’s payment stack has reached a level of maturity that institutions can finally build on with confidence. Fiat on-ramps are familiar and regulated. Stablecoin issuers operate with transparency and strict oversight. Settlement on Solana is fast, predictable, and inexpensive. And merchants have multiple acceptance paths that fit cleanly into existing workflows.

The result is a complete loop: money enters through providers users already trust, moves as regulated digital dollars, settles instantly on Solana, and reaches merchants or recipients without added friction. This is the first cycle where the full infrastructure exists for global, internet-native payments that feel as seamless as the products built on top of them.

Total stablecoin issuance continues to increase year over year, and Solana is positioning itself not just as a high-performance blockchain but as a settlement layer that connects the traditional financial system to real-time digital money on a global scale.

In the next part of this series, we’ll explore Market Infrastructure & Execution, eg trading advantages with Jito, Raiku and other high-performance order books.