Stagingcrossmint case study (#1608)

* fix: replace JPEG images with WEBP format for improved performance

* content(media): publish Crossmint case study

Publishes the Crossmint case study with updated metadata, categories, tags, publish date, hero image, and formatted content.

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Co-authored-by: harkl <3zy3@protonmail.ch>
Co-authored-by: harkl <89045610+h4rkl@users.noreply.github.com>

Author: simonliu-sf

apps/media/content/posts/case-study-crossmint.mdx

@@ -1,63 +1,116 @@
 ---
-title: "Case Study: Crossmint scales NFT minting to unlock new use cases"
+title: >-
+  Crossmint on Solana: Enterprise Wallets, Stablecoin Rails, and Real-World
+  Payments
+status: published
+heroImage: /uploads/posts/case-study-crossmint/heroImage.webp
 description: >-
-  Crossmint, an NFT tooling and API company, is using state compression to drop
-  NFTs at a massive scale.
-publishedAt: 2023-04-06T00:00:00.000Z
+  Read how Crossmint’s Solana infrastructure supports Western Union USDPT,
+  fomo’s $2.5B volume, Tala wallets, and Wirex smart wallets.
+author: solana-foundation
+publishedAt: 2026-06-30T13:00:00.000Z
 categories:
-  - category: developers
+  - category: payments
+  - category: institutions
   - category: finance
-heroImage: /uploads/posts/case-study-crossmint/da636bc4bb15418abb7a251652917434.webp
-status: published
-author: solana-foundation
+  - category: developers
+  - category: ecosystem
 tags:
   - tag: case-studies
+  - tag: payments
+  - tag: stable-coin
+  - tag: fintech
+  - tag: api
+  - tag: ai
+  - tag: solana
+switchback: payments-org
 ---
 
-Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can unlock a lot of use cases, from commemorative collectibles to mass-scale ticketing, to the future of customer loyalty. Unique, collectible tokens linked to someone’s digital wallet can supercharge brand fandom by giving fans a new way to take pride in their virtual identities and find belonging in a global community .
+Crossmint provides wallet, stablecoin, ramp, and payment infrastructure for enterprises building on Solana. As a Solana Developer Platform launch partner, Crossmint helps companies embed smart wallets, move fiat into stablecoins, sponsor transactions, and connect onchain settlement to real-world payment rails through a single API. Customers including Western Union, fomo, and Wirex show how Solana-based financial products can reach production without requiring every enterprise team to build blockchain infrastructure from scratch.
+
+## Highlights
+
+Crossmint’s Solana deployments span stablecoin issuance, fiat-to-Solana checkout, global payouts, and smart wallet infrastructure for fintechs.
+
+1. **Western Union x Solana x Crossmint.** Western Union (NYSE: WU) selected Crossmint to support USDPT, its U.S. dollar stablecoin on Solana, and its Digital Asset Network connecting digital dollars to 360,000+ cash payout points worldwide.
+2. **A launch partner for the Solana Developer Platform.** Crossmint joined SDP in March 2026 alongside early users Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union.
+3. **Production-grade fiat-to-Solana checkout.** fomo scaled to $2.5B in volume and 470,000+ users on Crossmint's token checkout, with weekly active traders growing 7x within weeks of integration.
+4. **Stablecoin rails for the global majority.** Tala has disbursed $8.5B in credit to 14M underserved customers across 8 emerging markets over its history, and now Crossmint powers their wallet layer to provision stablecoin lending in seconds, no bank account required.
+5. **Smart wallets purpose-built for fintech.** Wirex upgraded their EOA wallet infrastructure to Crossmint smart wallets on Solana for 7M+ customers across 130+ countries.
+6. **Agentic finance, built for Solana.** Crossmint also supports agentic payment infrastructure, including policy-bound wallets and card APIs for AI-native payments.
+
+## The Problem: enterprises want to build on Solana, but the path to production is fragmented
+
+Sub-second finality, sub-cent fees, and Token Extensions have answered "is Solana ready?" For enterprise payment products, those properties matter because high-frequency transfers, small-value payments, gas-sponsored wallets, and compliance-aware token flows only work if settlement is fast, inexpensive, and programmable. The harder question is how to ship fast and compliantly.
+
+Historically, that required stitching together five or more vendors: embedded wallets, onramps, offramps, stablecoin orchestration, KYC/KYB and Travel Rule compliance, gas sponsorship, and transaction monitoring. Each integration meant a new API, contract, and failure point.
+
+> “Enterprises come to Solana with a clear vision but no clear path to handling money movement. That's the gap we fill.”
+>
+> — Rodrigo Fernández Touza, Co-Founder of Crossmint
+
+## The Solution: one API for wallets, ramps, stablecoins, and payments
+
+Through a single developer-friendly API, builders on Solana get:
+
+- [Embedded smart wallets](https://www.crossmint.com/products/wallet-infrastructure?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) with spending limits, session keys, gas sponsorship, passkey/social/email authentication, and modular signers that eliminate vendor lock-in.
+- [Fiat onramps](https://www.crossmint.com/products/onramps?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) with cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, and local payment methods across 180+ countries, with KYC/KYB and AML built in.
+- [Fiat offramps](https://www.crossmint.com/products/offramps?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) to local bank rails, mobile money, and 100,000+ cash pickup locations.
+- [Stablecoin orchestration](https://www.crossmint.com/products/stablecoin-orchestration?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) routing USDC, USDT, USDPT, and others across Solana and 50+ chains.
+- [Token checkout](https://www.crossmint.com/products/digital-asset-checkout?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) for instant card and Apple Pay purchases of supported Solana tokens, fully headless.
+- [Agentic payment infrastructure](https://www.crossmint.com/solutions/agentic-payments?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) with policy-bound agent wallets and an [agentic cards API](https://www.crossmint.com/announcement/agentic-cards-api-launch-visa-basistheory?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic).
+- **Built-in compliance** including MiCA authorization in the EU and SOC 2 controls.
+
+An enterprise can embed wallets, accept fiat from cards, settle stablecoins on Solana, and pay out to a local bank account through a single integration.
+
+## Customer case studies
 
-There’s just one problem: Minting NFTs en masse is expensive. Even on Solana, which has some of the lowest transaction fees of any blockchain, minting NFTs for a loyalty program can be cost prohibitive for mainstream companies.
+### Western Union (USDPT)
 
-[Crossmint,](https://www.crossmint.com/) an NFT tooling and API company, is making it easier for enterprise companies to drop NFTs on a massive scale. They use a recent innovation on Solana known as [compressed NFTs](https://solana.com/news/how-to-use-compressed-nfts-on-solana), which uses [state compression](https://solana.com/news/state-compression-compressed-nfts-solana) to make NFTs cheaper for customers.
+In May 2026, Western Union launched USDPT on Solana alongside its Digital Asset Network, which is designed to connect digital dollars to local-currency cash access through Western Union’s global payout footprint.
 
-“The key feature of compressed NFTs is that they make large-scale use cases economically feasible for the first time,” said Crossmint cofounder Rodri Fernández Touza. “When you look at use cases like ticketing, soccer season passes and so on, all of these before were infeasible because you'd have to spend about 40 cents per ticket \[to mint the NFT\] — and that's too much.”
+[Crossmint is partnering with Western Union as an infrastructure partner to support the rollout](https://www.crossmint.com/announcement/partnering-with-western-union-to-support-usdpt-stablecoin-and-digital-asset-network-on-solana?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic).
 
-Compressed NFTs are a new class of non-fungible tokens on Solana that employs a technique known as state compression to reduce the load of data storage. State compression uses a Merkle tree structure to store the minimal amount of data onchain in order to confirm that the underlying data is correct. Meanwhile, updates are stored in the Solana ledger to take advantage of the chain’s security and decentralization, and RPC providers like Triton, Helius, and SimpleHash can help with the heavy lifting of managing the tree.
+> “Working with partners like Crossmint helps seamlessly connect global wallets and digital platforms to Western Union's trusted payment infrastructure.”
+>
+> — Malcolm Clarke, Vice President of Digital Assets, Western Union
 
-In 2022, the Solana Foundation [introduced the concept of compressed NFTs,](https://twitter.com/jnwng/status/1555559586047766531?lang=en&ref=solana.ghost.io) one of the first use cases for state compression. Instantly, the cost for minting a Solana NFT dropped to roughly $0.000005.
+### fomo
 
-By compressing the underlying data, NFT developers can store more information on the blockchain at a lower cost while maintaining the integrity and uniqueness of their respective digital assets. Even better, the cost of minting NFTs gets cheaper at higher volumes, lowering barriers to on a massive scale.
+fomo is the largest cross-chain trading app in crypto, with $2.5B in trading volume and 470,000+ users. To solve crypto's first-mile problem — getting money on-chain — [fomo integrated Crossmint's token checkout](https://www.crossmint.com/announcement/fomo-crossmint-token-checkout?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic).
 
-## **Enterprise use cases for compressed NFTs**
+Users buy any supported token with Apple Pay or card in two to three clicks. For Solana-based token purchases, Crossmint’s checkout removes the wallet setup, gas, and funding steps that usually block first-time users. The integration drove $570,000+ in trading volume across 9,000+ transactions in week one, and weekly active traders grew 7x in the following weeks.
 
-“There's a massive spike in enterprise demand for blockchain infrastructure,” wrote Crossmint co-founder Fernández Touza [in a recent LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7039723837751455744/).
+> “Crossmint has been an integral partner in bringing the best social trading experience to new crypto users.”
+>
+> — Se Yong Park, CEO at fomo
 
-The blockchain infrastructure provider has already minted roughly 300,000 NFTs for holders of the Crossmint wallet to recognize them for being early adopters. The drop was what Solana Foundation ecosystem technical lead Jon Wong describes as “proof of success,” in that it demonstrated the efficiency of state compression for a straightforward use case.
+### Tala
 
-Let’s look at the cost breakdown of Crossmint’s drop. A standard NFT mint on Solana costs about 0.012 SOL, or roughly $0.24 at the time of writing. “Typically, this cost is borne by the minter — not the distributor,” explains Wong. Companies, brands and enterprises that want to reward users need a more efficient solution that doesn’t require asking customers to shoulder the cost, and a company paying $0.24 for each user is far too cost-prohibitive.
+Tala which has disbursed $8.5 billion in credit to 14 million underserved customers across 8 emerging markets over its history, moved its consumer wallets and treasury onto stablecoin rails powered by Crossmint in 2026. Cashback and loan repayments now land in customer wallets in seconds — no bank account, no waiting days. Crossmint co-founder Rodrigo Fernández Touza sat down with Tala Founder & CEO Shivani Siroya to discuss how Crossmint and Tala can serve users who are underserved by traditional banking systems in a [recent podcast](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shivanisiroya_when-we-set-out-to-solve-credit-for-the-global-ugcPost-7462555458646753280-rgiM/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABJVBS4BkOw_ALI-bMsC3tnca68SA5eaClA).
 
-In Crossmint’s case, delivering NFTs to 300,000 users under normal circumstances would cost over $74,000 (at the time of writing). With state compression, that cost is less than $200.
+### Wirex
 
-![](/uploads/posts/case-study-crossmint/image-1.webp)
+The UK-based digital payments platform serves 7M+ customers across 130+ countries with $20B+ in transaction volume. [Wirex moved from EOAs to Crossmint smart wallets](https://www.crossmint.com/case-study/building-the-future-of-banking-with-wirex?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) to power programmable financial accounts with bank-grade governance enforced on-chain, consolidating multiple wallet vendors into one platform. Crossmint wallet infrastructure provides a way for fintechs like Wirex to future-proof their wallet layer. Practically, this means that Wirex can rotate or upgrade their signers without changing their wallet address. End users can keep their address, balances, and transaction history regardless of infrastructure changes.
 
-This chart is based on a snapshot taken on April 5, 2023 and based on a price of SOL at $21.14, MATIC at $1.14, and ETH at $1,909.45. [See footnote.](https://solana.com/news/case-study-crossmint#fn)
+## Emerging Capability: Agentic finance
 
-## **Mass scale NFTs for customer engagement**
+While the customer examples above are live enterprise payment and wallet deployments, Crossmint is also extending the same smart-wallet model to AI agents. 
 
-Fernández Touza says it’s now possible to create mass-scale NFTs at a virtually negligible cost. With one successful use case already proven, the Crossmint team is experimenting with new possibilities that before would have been too cost-prohibitive to consider. They’re exploring a few new promising areas with interesting potential for customer engagement.
+AI agents are becoming economic actors. They’re subscribing to APIs, paying for compute, and increasingly have been transacting on behalf of users. For agents to operate autonomously, the wallet itself has to enforce the rules. EOAs can't: spending limits live in application code, and a bug in the agent bypasses them. Crossmint's [smart contract wallets](https://docs.crossmint.com/wallets/why-smart-wallets?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) on Solana solve this with a two-signer architecture: an owner signer with full control, and an agent signer (sealed in a TEE) with scoped permissions enforced by the wallet itself. The agent decides when to pay. The smart contract enforces how much.
 
-To start, Crossmint is building no-code tools that plug directly into Zapier, an automation platform that connects to over 5,000 apps, including Slack, Mailchimp, Facebook, Saleforce and most social media platforms. This would allow today’s creator or brand to reward customers with digital tokens based on certain actions without code.
+## Crossmint and the Solana Developer Platform
 
-In another example, one Crossmint client recently created an API for NFT receipts, says Fernández Touza. Imagine buying an item through an ecommerce store and automatically receiving a pass that proves that you purchased it. Whereas now, receipts offer proof of purchase. NFT receipts could signal membership of some kind, or even offer the ability to create smart rewards or loyalty programs through customers’ crypto wallets.
+Solana Developer Platform is the Solana Foundation's API-driven platform giving enterprises a single interface to issuance, payments, and trading on Solana. Early users include Western Union, Mastercard, and Worldpay. [Crossmint joined at launch as the wallet and payments infrastructure partner](https://www.crossmint.com/announcement/crossmint-joins-solana-developer-platform?utm_source=solana&utm_medium=organic) — a single integration to move money in, move money out, and pay anyone, anywhere.
 
-NFT receipts are in its beta phase, but Fernández Touza says such developments continue to inspire and inform how Crossmint integrates its no-code tools and products with enterprise platforms across industries.
+For builders, Crossmint’s SDP role means wallet creation, fiat funding, stablecoin movement, gas sponsorship, and payout connectivity can sit behind the same enterprise-facing Solana integration path.
 
-Fernández Touza describes some other ideas to improve customer engagement, even beyond loyalty programs, with compressed NFTs:
+> “SDP allows enterprises to build in days, rather than months. Infrastructure partners like Crossmint will help accelerate enterprises' stablecoin solutions and we're eager to see the growth it enables.”
+>
+> — Catherine Gu, Head of Product, Digital Assets, Solana Foundation
 
-- **Social media incentivization.** Imagine having the ability to send a new Instagram or Twitter follower an NFT that comes with perks and incentives. “You can talk, engage, track insights and enable access to certain perks only to people following you,” explains Fernández Touza. A creator or brand could even upgrade the NFTs of collectors who interact on social media.
-- **Gaming, extended reality assets and metaverse experiences.** Compressed NFTs can be used to mint in-game assets like skins, characters, items or virtual land. Compression keeps storage and transfer costs under control, allowing the user to stay focused on the important part — playing.
-- **Onchain credentials.** While some Crossmint clients already do this with uncompressed NFTs, Fernández Touza predicts that online education platforms could soon use compressed NFTs to reward those who complete digital courses with onchain verified credentials, which could serve as a handy way to stand out in the future job market.
+## What this means for Solana builders
 
-Compressed NFTs make building engaging relationships much simpler and scalable — and better for both businesses and their customers.
+For fintechs, enterprises and agent platforms building on Solana, Crossmint compresses what used to be a multi-vendor, years-long integration into a single API and a launch measured in weeks. fomo shows headless card-to-Solana checkout converts at scale. Tala shows where stablecoin rails may matter most: faster dollar movement for users underserved by traditional banking infrastructure. Wirex demonstrates the value of smart wallet infrastructure. Crossmint’s agentic wallets extend the same Solana smart-wallet model to AI-native payment flows.
 
-Footnote (Click to expand)
+The broader lesson for the Solana ecosystem is that enterprise adoption depends on both settlement infrastructure and integration infrastructure. Solana provides fast, low-cost, programmable settlement. Crossmint helps package those capabilities into wallet, ramp, and payment APIs that enterprises can actually ship.