Will Solana's latest slogan ignite a financial revolution?

Author: @zhouKelvinZzzz

In the second half of 2025, Solana's official website quietly changed its slogan from “Web3 Infrastructure for Everyone” to “Global Financial Infrastructure for Everyone.”

This change actually highlights that Solana is strengthening its financial position - the image of blockchain technology is taking a back seat, while financial infrastructure is becoming the main focus.

The implications behind this are quite profound—Solana is actively transforming “blockchain technology” into infrastructure, emphasizing its financial attributes and the capacity for institutional applications. Solana's financialization strategy is gaining substantial support and investment from major financial players such as Visa, Stripe, PayPal, Apollo, and BlackRock, with institutional participation having entered the stages of product implementation and scaled activity, rather than merely normal technical exploration or conceptual institutional focus.

Solana is expected to be increasingly recognized as the default platform for asset issuance, stablecoins, RWA management, and financial innovation by both traditional and emerging finance. Unlike the previous simple investment in Solana's coin price, a more critical new era is emerging where “finance is being conducted on Solana,” allowing the on-chain infrastructure to truly become the network for global capital and financial markets. This role upgrade will lead Solana institutions from basic Web3 tools to a global internet capital network, achieving deep integration of institutional financial value and compliant applications.

Strategic Positioning Transformation: From Infrastructure to Financial Dedicated Platform

In 2025, as the Meme market cools down, the market begins to reflect on the long-term prospects of Solana: besides the meme coin effect, what else does Solana have left?

In fact, with the market's attention, Solana has completed a comprehensive leap from technical prototype and basic ecosystem construction to application sectors over the past two years.

In the past, most people focused on the traffic sector and the “hit innovations” on the blockchain, but when delving into the Solana ecosystem, one will find the gradual emergence of financial infrastructure—areas such as DeFi, assets, stablecoins, RWA, AI, and NFTs are becoming mainstream growth drivers.

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With the gradual improvement of various infrastructure and ecological elements, Solana has finally found the main line of development focusing on financial infrastructure.

From a technical data perspective, this is not a fantasy:

Time Dimension: Traditional systems operate from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays, while Solana operates 24/7 without interruption.

Speed Dimension: Traditional transfers take 1-5 days, Solana confirms in 2-3 seconds.

Cost dimension: Traditional international transfers cost 15-50 USD, Solana costs 0.0005 USD

Processing capacity: Actual TPS reached 869 (1-hour average), peak 5,289 TPS

Stablecoins, today's on-chain treasury (DAT), RWA assets, institutional custody, and integrated payments have become the most critical growth engines of the ecosystem, attracting global financial institutions and capital to continue their布局. This not only completes the construction of “blockchain tools” but also enters a new stage of global financial infrastructure.

Solana's financial layout breakthrough in 2025

Solana's Move Towards Finance

On October 23, 2025, at the 11th Wanxiang Global Blockchain Summit, Lily Liu (@calilyliu), Chair of the Solana Foundation, delivered a keynote speech titled “Building New Finance,” publicly elaborating on Solana's financial positioning. Delivered a keynote speech titled “Building New Finance,” publicly elaborating on Solana's financial positioning.

“Solana is to finance what Netflix is to entertainment and Amazon is to shopping - a disruptor on the scale of the internet, growing at an unprecedented speed and redefining the path of modern finance.”

The core of this analogy is: the new platform not only innovates the product form but also expands the way users access services.

Netflix has made entertainment no longer limited to television/cinema, but has turned it into on-demand streaming accessible anytime and anywhere.

Amazon has transformed shopping from offline to a one-click online e-commerce experience, achieving instant and borderless consumption.

Solana will gain limited improvements and processes from traditional banks/exchanges' financial services, thereby enhancing, automating, and simplifying on-chain finance.

Solana's financial breakthrough

1. Digital Asset Treasury ( DAT ): Institutional Capital Solana-ized

Market size突破

According to tracking data from CoinGecko, 19 listed companies hold a total of 15.4 million SOL( worth approximately 300 million USD), accounting for 2.5% of the circulating supply.

Committed to invest over $4.3 billion, including PIPE financing, ATM plans, and convertible bonds.

Annual growth rate reaches over 100%, and the holding volume is expected to double by 2026.

Performance of leading companies

The following is the specific performance of the DAT company.

Source: rwa.xyz

DAT Analysis

1. BTC, ETH, and SOL have higher on-chain real yields:

Multicoin Capital points out that SOL offers returns that BTC and ETH lack. Compared to Bitcoin, Solana's SOL stakers receive higher average annual yields. The annual yield for SOL staking is approximately 8%. Of this, about 6.19% comes from inflation issuance, while the remaining 1.86% originates from on-chain real economic activities and MEV. This cash flow driven by real trading behavior and MEV makes SOL more attractive as a long-term capital and underlying asset for a Digital Asset Treasury (DAT).

2. DAT Company can achieve higher capital utilization:

DeFi directly matches lending and borrowing through blockchain and smart contracts, eliminating the need for traditional banks and other intermediaries, which often significantly reduces operational and matching costs.

By comparing the interest rate spread between the financing costs provided by traditional banks for listed companies and the financing costs of DeFi, arbitrage operations can be conducted. DeFi offers a network-native financing model that is intermediary-free, lower in cost, and higher in transparency, while the traditional banking system is characterized by centralization, high costs, and strict approvals. This type of DeFi arbitrage not only has a high profit margin but can also interact with numerous counterparties in various ways, forming a diverse revenue model.

2. Stablecoin Ecosystem: The Core of Payment Infrastructure

Explosive growth in supply

The total supply of Solana stablecoins skyrocketed from $5.2 billion at the end of 2024 to $16 billion.

A year-on-year growth of 170%, becoming the third largest stablecoin chain, only behind Ethereum and Tron.

USDC dominates ( with 10.6 billion ), while USDT rapidly grows to 4.5 billion (. The surge of stablecoins on Solana at the beginning of 2025 coincided with the launch of Donald Trump's meme coin $TRUMP, triggering a wave of capital inflow into the network. The Trump meme coin spread across various sectors, with political, financial, and entertainment circles discussing it together, quickly breaking the boundaries of the traditional crypto community, and bringing in significant liquidity and new community energy for Solana and the overall industry. At the same time, new regulations in the U.S. such as the GENIUS Act bring compliance benefits to the stablecoin industry, leading to a sharp increase in the issuance and use of compliant stablecoins by enterprises and users on the Solana chain.

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3. Payment Infrastructure: From Pilot to Production Deployment

Payment Infrastructure: From Pilot to Production-Level Deployment

In 2025, Visa officially announced the inclusion of Solana in its stablecoin settlement platform, marking Solana's formal transition from an early experimental phase to a traditional financial production environment. This milestone positions Solana alongside Ethereum, Stellar, and Avalanche, supporting real-time card settlement services for mainstream stablecoins such as USDC and EURC.

Visa's construction on the multi-chain and multi-currency settlement architecture for stablecoins enhances the liquidity and payment efficiency of funds on the Solana chain, providing banks, fintech companies, and merchants with a faster and lower-cost payment experience.

The payment scale has achieved rapid breakthroughs.

The average monthly trading volume of stablecoins on the Solana chain has reached 50 billion USD, with daily active users between 3 million and 4 million, demonstrating a strong user base and capital momentum.

With the increasing acceptance by merchants, over 6,000 merchants are accepting cryptocurrency payments through Solana Pay, and the transaction fee rate has decreased to about 1%, greatly promoting the popularization and practical application of cryptocurrency payments.

Practical business application cases

Mastercard has partnered with MoonPay to successfully connect 3.5 billion Mastercard cards to Solana wallets, allowing consumers to seamlessly use their credit cards to interact with the Solana ecosystem, promoting the everyday use of digital assets.

The e-commerce platform Helio collaborates with Shopify to launch an instant cryptocurrency checkout solution, effectively avoiding the chargeback risks associated with traditional payments and providing online retailers and consumers with a safer and more convenient payment experience.

Western Union announced that it will launch the USDPT dollar stablecoin on the Solana blockchain, with plans to release the USDPT dollar payment token in the first half of 2026. This will provide more convenient international remittance services for over 100 million Western Union customers, while also significantly reducing costs and accelerating transaction speeds.

Here we make a simple comparison:

In summary, the integration of stablecoin settlement has propelled Solana's payment infrastructure from the pilot phase to large-scale commercial deployment, establishing Solana's important position as a new generation global payment network, along with the increasing on-chain transaction volume and rich ecosystem collaborations.

4. Traditional Financial Integration: A Bridge for Trillion-Level Assets

R3 Corda Bridging: Deployed Solutions

On September 4, 2025, R3 Labs officially launched, bridging $17 billion of RWA assets on the Corda network to Solana through native interoperability:

Available instantly: Bonds, funds, etc. can be traded on Solana 24/7.

Trustless: Native cross-chain, no third-party custody required

Economies of scale: Connecting institutional clients such as DTCC and Nasdaq

Institutional-grade custody solutions

Helius: Manages 13 billion SOL delegated staking, providing enterprise-level services for The Solana Company and others.

Anchorage Digital: Provides federally licensed SOL custody and integrates Jupiter DEX for DeFi access.

anchorage

BitGo: New Solana support added, serving institutional ETFs and corporate treasuries.

5. ETF Progress

6. Overview of Global Solana ETF Compliance

In 2025, Solana's spot ETF officially enters the global mainstream capital market, becoming the first mainstream Layer 1 asset to achieve the dual innovation of “spot + staking” after Bitcoin and Ethereum. ETF applications and implementations are seen in the USA, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, and other regions, promoting compliance of institutional and retail users in the financial transformation of the SOL ecosystem.

USA: The SEC accelerates the approval of SOL ETFs, with leading institutions like Bitwise (BSOL) and Grayscale (GSOL) approved for spot and staking ETFs, allowing investors to not only hold SOL assets but also automatically earn staking rewards, with ETF net value including annualized returns.

Hong Kong: Huaxia Fund has launched Asia's first Solana spot ETF, which only holds pure spot positions, and the staking function is not yet open. The trading threshold is low, and the compliance and security are high.

Canada/Singapore: Several asset management companies are exploring spot + staking fund products, with financing and custody models gradually aligning with those in the US and Canada, promoting regional innovation.

2. Spot ETF vs Staking ETF, the underlying logic of institutional favorites

Spot ETF: Directly holding SOL and trading it in traditional securities accounts allows investors to conveniently participate in the price fluctuations of SOL, suitable for retail and institutional clients who value liquidity and have low entry barriers.

Staking ETF: The fund will hold SOL for on-chain staking, achieving an annualized return of about 7%. The returns will be directly included in the ETF net value, and investors do not need to participate in on-chain node operations. The US and Canadian markets have already achieved automated income distribution, enhancing product attractiveness and capital utilization efficiency.

3. Investment Impact and Industry Significance

The globalization demonstration of Solana ETF not only lowers the technical threshold for blockchain investments but also promotes market compliance and transparency. The birth of staking ETFs marks that digital assets can drive real cash flow and enhance capital efficiency, becoming an important vehicle for DeFi, corporate treasuries, and RWA management. Solana ETF has become a bridge and innovation engine for traditional finance to enter the cryptocurrency market.

Summary of the Solana Financial Ecosystem Closed Loop

Solana is building a new type of global financial infrastructure that achieves a closed financial system through the “deposit entrance” of traditional and innovative assets and the “capital flow” of on-chain application scenarios.

ETF and DAT - The entry threshold for investment has been lowered, allowing institutional and public funds to flow into ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds) and DAT (Digital Asset Treasury), opening the door for fiat/capital entry into the Solana ecosystem for institutions, enterprises, and investors. ETFs enable SOL to become a compliant mainstream asset, while DAT allows corporate treasuries and publicly listed companies to achieve on-chain asset management and strategic reserves, driving the inflow of tens of billions of dollars. Together, these two mechanisms bring sustainable and institutionalized funding to Solana, solidifying its position as a foundational layer in global finance.

On-chain stocks and RWA - asset digitization, new forms of capital markets such as corporate digital treasury, RWA (real-world assets), and on-chain stocks, promote the issuance, custody, and trading of traditional assets, funds, bonds, etc., on the Solana chain, introducing a digital asset management model with high transparency and high liquidity to the capital market. The innovative practices of heavyweight enterprises drive the integration of real industries with blockchain finance, enabling global funds to achieve “on-chain management” to “on-chain usage.”

Stablecoins and Payments - The use cases for funds are flourishing, and on-chain economies are active. Stablecoins (such as USDC and USDT) have become the core foundation for payments and circulation on the Solana chain, with supply and transaction volumes growing rapidly. This promotes efficient and low-cost realization of merchant settlements, user transfers, and corporate fund circulation. Through stablecoin payments, the Solana network has become the infrastructure for global payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, processing billions of dollars in transfers daily, with cross-border costs and speeds superior to traditional financial systems.

In summary, Solana has achieved a financial ecological closed loop of “capital inflow → on-chain circulation → expansion of application scenarios,” attracting mainstream funds through ETFs and DAT, creating actual circulation with stablecoins and payments, and deeply landing enterprise and on-chain asset scenarios. This has resulted in a comprehensive leap from underlying infrastructure to institutional applications, making it a pioneer network in the digital transformation of finance.

The power of Solana from the East

1. Compliance ETF Innovation: Huaxia ETF and Solana Progress in Eastern Countries

2. Hong Kong takes the lead in listing Solana spot ETF

On October 27, 2025, the Solana spot ETF issued by Huaxia Fund (Hong Kong) was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, marking the first connection between the Asian capital markets and the Solana ecosystem. Unlike the “spot + staking” innovation in the US and Canada markets, the Hong Kong ETF currently only holds native SOL and does not offer on-chain staking rewards, fully reflecting a prudent and compliant orientation that meets the high standards for custody and regulation locally. The ETF supports multi-currency settlement (HKD, USD, RMB), significantly lowering the entry barrier for Eastern investors into the Solana ecosystem.

2. ETF dynamics in Eastern countries such as South Korea and Singapore

South Korea and Southeast Asia have not yet formally approved the Solana spot ETF, but institutional interest continues to rise. The capital markets in Singapore and Australia have already seen attempts at derivative ETFs and fund products targeting SOL, with some public funds in Singapore trying to align with the spot ETF route in the US and Canada, opening up local compliance channels. South Korea's Upbit has opened up services for on-chain and circulation of Solana assets, promoting compliance innovation.

3. Compliance Breakthrough in Staking Innovation

Currently, most Asian ETF products are purely spot-based and do not involve staking rebate functions. This is related to the high standards of control by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission and the Monetary Authority of Singapore regarding node security and third-party custody. In the future, as security solutions mature and regulatory pressures ease, staking ETFs are expected to enter the Asian market, driving SOL “holding + earning interest” to become mainstream and participate in the global on-chain economy.

2. Enterprise-level applications: Solana's cooperation model with local leading enterprises

3. CCB International and On-chain RWA Innovation

In August 2025, China Merchants Bank International, in collaboration with DigiFT, Singapore OnChain, and Hong Kong New Public Fund, took the lead in issuing US dollar money market funds as RWA assets, utilizing Solana's multi-chain ecosystem for custody and distribution. This initiative promoted the “on-chain subscription” of Hong Kong New Fund products, strengthening the integration of financial institutions with on-chain infrastructure. This move significantly enhanced the digital circulation efficiency of “real-world assets” and broadened the traditional financial compliance asset custody methods.

2. Huawei Cloud and Solana

Huawei Cloud has been actively laying out Web3 infrastructure, distributed computing, and enterprise multi-chain services, while Solana is a public chain with high performance and an active developer ecosystem, demonstrating strong potential in the Asia-Pacific region and enterprise application expansion. In combination with the needs of cloud service providers for on-chain high-frequency trading, data storage, and node hosting, Huawei Cloud is expected to provide more stable, compliant, and efficient infrastructure support for Solana ecosystem projects. It aims to provide enterprise-level clients in the Asia-Pacific region with the ability to directly connect on-chain data with cloud systems, promoting the integration of fintech and the real economy.

Including at this year's Token2049 event, we also saw @Solana_zh and Huawei together.

3. Asia-Pacific Reform Power: Solana's Ecological Development in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia

4. Ecological Activation of South Korea and Japan

South Korea's blockchain open policy has enabled the rapid penetration of the Solana ecosystem, with exchanges such as Upbit offering Solana asset on-chain circulation services. Several South Korean capital and internet companies are exploring cooperation with Solana DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) to realize the implementation of data certification, IoT device settlement, Web3 applications, and other directions. Meanwhile, Japanese capital continues to invest in Solana NFTs and DeFi projects, promoting global innovation and local collaboration.

2. The Web3 Highlands of the Southeast Asian Market

Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore have become the largest user base and high-density innovation hubs for Solana in the Asia-Pacific region. Each year, the Asia-Pacific Solana Summit attracts thousands of entrepreneurs and development teams, giving rise to new projects such as native stablecoin applications, cross-chain RWA protocols, and on-chain data hosting. Solana's high TPS, low latency, and low-cost features are extremely well-suited to the needs of mobile, payment, and cross-border finance in Southeast Asia.

3. DePIN and the Hardware Industry Collaboration

The Asia-Pacific manufacturing and hardware supply chain has become the main manufacturing base for Solana's DePIN project equipment. Countries such as China, Vietnam, and Malaysia provide essential hardware like mining machines and mobile nodes to the global market, supporting the distributed computing needs of Solana. The huge demographic dividend and the widespread adoption of mobile internet accelerate the implementation of Solana's ecosystem in daily applications across mobile payments, gaming, audiovisual entertainment, and digital identity.

4. Community-Driven and Innovation Acceleration

The large digital native population and the young, highly active communities in East Asia and Southeast Asia make Solana one of the most vibrant public chains in the Web3 ecosystem, driving global liquidity and innovation “flowing in from the East,” forming a collective participation and fusion of capital, projects, and users from both the East and the West.

Summary

Solana's Eastern power not only leads the world in ETF compliance breakthroughs but also extends blockchain from financial investment to physical industries, data asset custody, and innovative financial integration through partnerships with local large enterprises such as CMB International and Huawei Cloud. The prosperity of the Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian markets, along with the rapid growth of hardware and user communities, has collectively shaped a new pattern for Solana in the East, providing a new model for the deep integration of global Web3, capital markets, and the real economy.

Conclusion

With Solana's strategic leap from Web3 technology infrastructure to global financial infrastructure standards by 2025, the entire ecosystem is having a profound impact on fintech, capital markets, and institutional innovation. Solana is not only reshaping the efficiency and model of financial services but also opening up new pathways for asset management, payments, investment, and compliance for enterprises and institutions. In the future, Solana is expected to become the core platform and industry standard for the digital transformation of global finance.

Specific directions worth paying attention to include:

The corporate treasury (DAT) model continues to grow and integrate with the real economy.

The expansion of stablecoins and on-chain payment scenarios, as well as the implementation of compliance mechanisms.

RWA (Real World Assets) large-scale digitization and cross-border custody

The diversification and innovation of ETFs and new financial products along with institutional capital inflow.

Technical performance enhancement and native compliance tools drive traditional financial integration

Looking ahead to 2026, with the approval of US ETFs, more banks integrating directly, and the popularization of corporate treasury allocations, Solana is expected to truly achieve its goal of “becoming the Netflix of finance”—making programmatic finance as simple, instant, and ubiquitous as streaming.