Mike Hale writes and edits every article on Stacksmith. He has 25 years of software development and enterprise technology experience. He is the Solana Technical Writer at Quicknode and Editor of the Colosseum Codex newsletter.
You can find him at mikehale.me, on X, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
The Solana Foundation has released @solana/web3.js v3, which keeps the Connection, PublicKey, Keypair, and Transaction classes from v1 and runs them on Solana Kit. It becomes the default npm install on October 19, 2026, and most of the migration is adding await to signing, serializing, and PDA calls.
Samsung is adding USDC transfers on Solana to Samsung Wallet, letting US users send money abroad from 82 million Galaxy devices starting the last week of October 2026. Transfers can land in bank accounts in more than 60 countries or in external crypto wallets, with custody handled by Bastion and Coinbase Prime.
Orca and Loopscale are merging into a single company called Formation, which pairs Orca's liquidity with Loopscale's credit and vaults so an issuer can launch a tokenized asset on Solana with trading and lending live from day one. Formation says DAWN Technologies launched a telecom debt product on the combined stack in under 30 days and took in more than $10 million in deposits in 24 hours.
The Solana Foundation has released Solana DvP, an MIT-licensed escrow program for delivery-versus-payment that settles both legs of a trade in one transaction, with input from J.P. Morgan on institutional settlement practices. Each party funds its leg with a standard token transfer, and a settlement authority named in the trade is the only signer that can settle it.
MetaDAO has renamed Futardio to Backable, its permissionless fundraising platform on Solana, and cut the cost of listing a raise from 0.5 SOL to $15. The platform carries over $44.2 million in commitments from 2,407 backers, and a new Ownership Score now decides who gets tokens when a raise is oversubscribed.
The Agentic Finance Report, co-authored by TensorX, AMINA Bank, the Solana Foundation, APEX:E3, and the Cardano Foundation, names Solana as the execution layer for AI agents managing institutional capital. Its Solana chapter cites a payment-channel benchmark of more than 1 million payments a second, and the report proposes enforcing compliance inside the token with Token-2022 transfer hooks.
