Solana offers two distinct standards for fungible assets. The classic SPL Token program is the original, minimal surface area for minting, holding, transferring, and freezing tokens. It is widely integrated across wallets, DEXs, custodians, and analytics, and its semantics are intentionally simple. Freezing in this model is performed at the token-account level by the mint’s freeze authority; once an individual account is frozen it cannot send or receive until thawed, and there is no native “global pause” that halts all transfers across the mint.
SPL Token is Solana’s minimal, ubiquitous standard: it’s simple, broadly supported, and great when you need everything to “just work.” The trade-off is limited policy control: freezes are per account, there’s no mint-wide pause, no native KYC or fees, and you can’t retrofit advanced features later.
Token Extensions (Token-2022) preserve SPL semantics but add transfer-time programmability. With Transfer Hook, Default Account State, delegate roles, and optional privacy, you can enforce allowlists, dynamic fees, or a true global pause directly on-chain. This power requires planning at mint initialization, tighter key/governance operations, and careful integration testing. If you launched on classic SPL and later need extensions, you’ll reissue under Token-2022 and run a 1:1 swap.
Choose by first constraint: if ecosystem reach and low friction matter most, ship SPL; if enforceable policy or compliance drives the design, start on Token Extensions and treat governance as product. The road ahead for Solana smart contracts is policy-aware assets by default—rules evaluated at transfer time, growing use of confidential transfers, and tooling that makes these behaviors safer and easier to adopt.
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