The Solana Foundation has announced the launch of token extensions, a major upgrade for the SPL token standard.
Token extensions: The newest iteration of the Solana token program was built in collaboration with large, regulated institutions and uses a standard interface to connect to Solana applications, allowing the creation of specialized tooling and functionality at the token level.
The first token extensions were included as part of the v.1.17 release of the Solana Labs validator client.
Solana's token extensions provide ready-to-use enhanced token capabilities on Solana, representing the future of tokenization.
Token extensions were developed expressly for builders in a variety of industries, including stablecoins, real-world assets (RWA) and payments.
The extensions include transfer hooks, which give token issuers control over how tokens and users interact, allowing for a flexible design that empowers developers to build elaborate token interactions; and transfer fees, which add the ability to charge a fee every time a token is transferred, providing long-term revenue models for any type of token built with token extensions.
Others include confidential transfers, which publicly share the source, destination and token type but use zero-knowledge proofs to encrypt the amount of the transfer while still providing the issuer with certain audit rights required for compliance; and non-transferability, which only allows the issuer to transfer tokens to another wallet. This functionality can be used to authenticate users and identify them uniquely.
There are presently over a dozen token extensions at the program level that enable additional use cases.
Some stablecoin issuers employing Solana have already begun to implement token extensions. Paxos, for example, recently used permanent delegation, a metadata pointer, transfer hooks and other features to launch its USDP stablecoin.