Mike Hale The Solana Foundation is now a Platinum member of the Rust Foundation, the top membership tier, which comes with a seat on the Rust Foundation's board. The Rust Foundation announced it on September 9, 2026, during opening remarks at RustConf 2026 in Montreal, alongside NVIDIA, which joined at the same tier the same day.
We’re thrilled to welcome Solana Foundation and NVIDIA as Platinum members of the Rust Foundation. Solana is one of the most active, fastest-growing developer ecosystems built natively on Rust, and its investment, including years of support as a RustConf sponsor, reflects how deeply Rust is woven into its business.
- Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, CEO, Rust Foundation
The Rust Foundation is the independent non-profit that stewards the Rust programming language. It funds maintainers, runs security work, and pays for the infrastructure Rust depends on, including crates.io, the package registry every Rust project pulls its dependencies from. With this membership, the Solana Foundation pays directly into the upkeep of the language most Solana programs are written in.
The Platinum tier now has nine members, according to the Rust Foundation's member list. They are Arm, AWS, Google, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and the Solana Foundation. The Solana Foundation is the only blockchain organization in the tier.
The Rust Foundation doesn't decide what goes into Rust. Its own founding FAQ says it exists to "support and complement" the Rust teams and "doesn't have a role in accepting RFCs," the proposals that change the language. Technical decisions stay with the Rust Project's own teams.
Rust runs most of Solana's onchain programs
Rust is the default language for Solana development. The Rust Foundation's announcement says Rust powers the majority of production programs on Solana, and the main frameworks developers reach for, Anchor and Pinocchio, are both Rust. Agave, the validator client maintained by Anza, is written in Rust too.
Solana doesn't compile programs with stock Rust, though. Programs run on sBPF, Solana's variant of the BPF bytecode format, and building for it requires a forked compiler. Anza's platform-tools repo ships Rust and Clang binaries that include "customizations and fixes required by Solana but not yet upstreamed into Rust or LLVM." That's the toolchain behind cargo build-sbf.
Does anything change for Solana developers?
Nothing changes in your workflow. There's no new toolchain to install, no crate to update, and no deadline attached to this. If you write Solana programs, you'll keep building with the same platform-tools release and pulling from the same crates.io.
A board seat won't get Solana's compiler fork merged into Rust. That's a call for the Rust Project and the LLVM maintainers, and the fork has outlived the 2021 plan to merge it. What the Rust Foundation does steer is money, meaning which maintainers get funded and how crates.io and the rest of Rust's infrastructure get paid for. That's where the Solana Foundation's seat can show up, and it's what Solana developers should hold it to.