Solana Weekly Recap (19 July 2026): x402 Becomes a Standard, SBI Bets on Solana, Alpenglow Nears Mainnet

The third week of July 2026 was about standards and institutions. The x402 payment protocol moved under the Linux Foundation, a Japanese financial group refocused its blockchain initiative on Solana, and the biggest overhaul of the core protocol moved a step closer to mainnet. We summarize the key developments and link our detailed coverage of each.

Standards and payments

x402 becomes an open standard: the Linux Foundation operationally launched the x402 Foundation; Coinbase handed the protocol into open governance. 40 organizations are members — including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, AWS, and the Solana Foundation. For context: over 30 days, roughly 75 million transactions ran through x402, but they moved only about $24 million in total. → Read more
Agentic commerce gets a hackathon: Google Cloud and the Solana Foundation are running a hackathon in which AI agents pay by themselves within set limits. Korean payment firms such as Shinhan Card and KSNET are partners; demo day is August 21. → Read more

Institutions and tokenized assets

SBI Holdings pivots to Solana: the Japanese financial group is moving its blockchain initiative from Corda to Solana. The joint venture will be called SBI Solana Global, with the Solana Foundation as a partner. Goals: stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and payment infrastructure for AI agents. → Read more

Infrastructure and protocol

Alpenglow bug bounty opened: Anza opened the bug bounty repository for the new consensus mechanism — a hardening step before mainnet. Submissions are not open yet; scope and rewards are to follow. The focus is on the voting engine votor and BLS signature verification. → Read more

DeFi

JTX is live — and JIP-38 sets the fee model: Jito’s self-custody trading platform launched, with spot trading for vetted assets and tokenized equities. In parallel, JIP-38 commits the DAO’s 80 percent share of JTX fees entirely to automated JTO buybacks, with the acquired tokens burned. → Read more