The post Solana vs XRP: Why Western Union Picked Solana to Build a Regulated Stablecoin Rail appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Western Union recently announced that it selected Solana to build a regulated stablecoin rail, departing from its earlier experiments with Ripple’s XRP technology. The initiative consists of the US Dollar Payment Token (USDPT) stablecoin and Digital Asset Network, both to be launched in the first half of 2026. XRP Pilot Delivered No Cost Savings Western Union tested Ripple’s xRapid service and XRP token in 2018. The company’s CEO at the time, Hikmet Ersek, stated the trials were too small to demonstrate savings and remained “still too expensive.” Ripple later confirmed the pilot involved only a handful of payments. The 2018 XRP test focused on using the token as a bridge asset for cross-border transfers. Western Union processes over $100 billion in annual transactions, according to recent reports. The pilot’s limited scope failed to prove XRP could reduce costs at that scale. Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan told attendees at Money20/20 that the company “looked at most of the other alternatives and came to the conclusion for an institutional use case like ours, the Solana blockchain was the right choice.” Solana offered three decisive advantages. First, major payment networks have already validated the blockchain for settlement. Visa expanded its USDC settlement to Solana and published a technical brief explaining how the network’s high throughput and low fees make it well-suited for card settlement. Stripe reintroduced crypto payments with USDC on Solana as a supported rail. Second, Solana led stablecoin activity and usage in terms of volume through 2024 and 2025. Artemis analytics revealed that the network commanded deeper liquidity and distribution than its competitors. Stablecoin transaction volumes in the last three years, divided by chain | Source: Artemis USDC launched natively on the XRP Ledger only in June 2025. XRPL’s Multi-Purpose Token standard went live in October 2025. Western Union opted…

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Filed under: News - @ October 31, 2025 9:26 am