Solana: The Transformation Journey from Blockchain to Financial Hub

Recently, as the sixth largest Blockchain network by market capitalization, Solana is actively expanding its business scope, attempting to transcend the limitations of cryptocurrency speculation and popular tokens. This network, with a market value of $82 billion, has taken a series of measures to move into the traditional financial sector.

In May, the Solana Foundation reached an agreement with the global software group R3, which manages $10 billion in tokenized assets for financial giants such as the European Clearing Bank, HSBC, and Bank of America. In the past two months, three listed companies have incorporated millions of dollars in SOL into their balance sheets, following the treasury strategy of Bitcoin.

Solana Labs even opened a luxurious headquarters "Skyline" in downtown Manhattan. Although this seems to contradict the concept of decentralized finance, it is a breath of fresh air for some developers. Jean Herelle, founder of CrunchDAO, stated that having a physical office building facilitates direct communication with the Solana technology team.

Solana has always been known for its high-speed and low-cost transaction services. Data shows that Solana can process over 4,000 transactions per second, with an average cost of only 0.5 cents. Herelle believes that the application scope of this technology far exceeds meme coins and is expected to reach institutional-level scale.

CrunchDAO uses machine learning to extract trends from Blockchain activities and build trading strategies for financial institutions. Herelle stated that the Solana Labs team facilitated his meeting with executives from major asset management firms. However, whether Solana can successfully transform into the preferred Blockchain for financial companies remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, the Solana Foundation has proven itself to be a flexible organization, able to grasp trends faster than Ethereum. In April this year, Bridgewater Capital invested $50 million into a new staking SOL fund. In May, Apollo launched a diversified credit fund worth $1.5 billion on the Solana network.

SOL Strategies is the largest corporate holder of SOL, with its stock price soaring 3900% over the past year and being included in two cryptocurrency asset ETFs from Invesco. Meanwhile, supporters are strengthening Solana's influence in Washington to address the upcoming regulatory framework.

In March of this year, a well-known cryptocurrency asset lobbying group established the Solana Policy Institute, aiming to educate regulators on the role of decentralized networks. Investors are optimistic about Solana's performance: over the past two years, the price of SOL has risen by more than 640%, whereas Ethereum has only risen by 45%.

Despite a series of outages from 2020 to 2024, Solana has remained a key player in the development of decentralized finance. In 2023, NFTs thrived on Solana, briefly surpassing Ethereum in total sales. In 2024, the launch of Pump.fun made Solana the preferred blockchain for meme coins.

It is precisely because of these developments that Solana supporters have begun to turn to large banks and asset management companies. In April of this year, executives from several well-known financial institutions attended a presentation held at Solana's New York office. Christine Moy, the head of digital assets at Apollo, elaborated on the company's cryptocurrency asset strategy and stated that they would fully promote the development of related businesses.