Author: Vincent
In the second half of 2025, Solana's official website quietly updated its slogan from "Web3 Infrastructure for Everyone" to "Global Financial Infrastructure for Everyone." This change highlights Solana's strategic shift toward strengthening its financial positioning—where blockchain technology takes a backseat, and financial infrastructure becomes the main focus.
The implications are profound: Solana is actively transforming "blockchain technology" into foundational infrastructure, emphasizing its financial attributes and institutional-grade application capabilities. Solana's financialization strategy is gaining substantial support and investment from major financial players such as Visa, Stripe, PayPal, Apollo, and BlackRock. Institutional involvement has progressed beyond mere technical exploration or conceptual interest to actual product deployment and scaling.
Solana is increasingly positioned as the default platform for asset issuance, stablecoins, RWA management, and financial innovation by both traditional and emerging financial institutions. Unlike earlier investments focused solely on SOL's price appreciation, the new era is defined by "using Solana for finance," enabling its on-chain infrastructure to become the network for global capital and financial markets. This role upgrade elevates Solana from a Web3 foundational tool to a global internet capital network, integrating institutional financial value and compliance-driven applications.
Strategic Repositioning: From Infrastructure to Financial Platform
In 2025, as meme coin hype faded, the market began to reflect on Solana's long-term value: beyond meme-driven momentum, what does Solana truly offer?
In reality, Solana has undergone a comprehensive evolution over the past two years—from technical prototyping and foundational ecosystem development to full-scale application deployment.
While many initially focused on high-traffic sectors and viral innovations, a deeper look into Solana's ecosystem reveals the steady maturation of financial infrastructure—DeFi, assets, stablecoins, RWA, AI, and NFT sectors are now driving mainstream growth.
Source: https://solana.messari.io/landscape
With the gradual refinement of infrastructure and ecosystem components, Solana has solidified its focus on financial infrastructure as its core development path.
Data supports this strategic shift:
Time Dimension: Traditional systems operate 9-5 on weekdays; Solana runs 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; Solana costs $0.0005
Processing Capacity: Actual TPS reaches 869 (1-hour average), with peaks at 5,289 TPS
Sectors like stablecoins, on-chain treasuries (DAT), RWA assets, institutional custody, and integrated payments have become critical growth engines, attracting sustained investment from global financial institutions and capital. This evolution marks not just the completion of "blockchain tool" construction but the entry into a new phase as a global financial infrastructure.
Solana's 2025 Financial Breakthroughs
Solana's Financial Transformation
On October 23, 2025, at the 11th Wanxiang Global Blockchain Summit, Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu delivered a keynote titled "Building New Finance," publicly articulating Solana's financial positioning.
"Solana is to finance what Netflix is to entertainment and Amazon is to shopping—an internet-scale disruptor growing at unprecedented speed, redefining modern finance."
The core analogy is this: new platforms not only revolutionize product forms but also transform how users access services.
Netflix made entertainment accessible beyond TV/cinemas, turning it into on-demand streaming anywhere, anytime.
Amazon transformed shopping from offline to one-click online e-commerce, enabling instant, borderless consumption.
Solana elevates, automates, and simplifies on-chain finance, moving beyond the limitations and processes of traditional banking and exchange services.
Solana's Financial Breakthroughs
1. Digital Asset Treasuries (DAT): Institutional Capital Goes Solana
Market Scale Breakthrough
According to CoinGecko data, 19 publicly traded companies collectively hold 15.4 million SOL (approx. $3 billion), representing 2.5% of circulating supply
Committed investment capital exceeds $4.3 billion, including PIPE financing, ATM programs, and convertible bonds
Annual growth rate exceeds 100%, with holdings potentially doubling by 2026
Leading Company Performance
Below are specific DAT company performances.
| Rank | Institution Name | SOL Holdings | Market Value (USD) | Company Type | Business Model Innovation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Forward Industries Inc | 6,822,000 | $1.32B | Corporate Treasury Management | Holds and manages large-scale SOL treasury, positioning digital assets as strategic corporate reserves; innovation lies in integrating blockchain assets into traditional corporate finance strategies for asset diversification |
| 2 | Solana Company | 2,200,000 | $423M | Biotech/High-Speed Data Transmission | Uses SOL treasury to fund new biotech infrastructure, exploring blockchain-driven data circulation and transparent research funding to advance industry digitization |
| 3 | DeFi Development Corp | 2,196,000 | $422.3M | DeFi Infrastructure | Leverages DeFi ecosystem strengths, directly participates in SOL validation nodes with corporate treasury; innovation in enterprise-grade node deployment and shared network incentives |
| 4 | Sharps Technology, Inc. | 2,140,000 | $411.5M | Medical Technology | Adopts SOL assets for corporate treasury, explores blockchain for secure medical device tracking and transparent asset ledgers to enhance compliance and safety |
| 5 | Upexi, Inc. | 2,000,000 | $384.6M | Holding & Multi-Sector Management | Integrates on-chain SOL assets through cross-sector holdings, promoting global data and asset circulation with diversified digital asset coordination |
| 6 | Solmate (Brera Holdings) | 1,215,000 | $233.6M | Digital Infrastructure | Combines SOL digital treasury as infrastructure asset pool, explores multi-national infrastructure project financing on-chain with innovative asset collateralization and decentralized operations |
| 7 | Mercurity Fintech | 1,083,000 | $208.3M | Fintech | Merges crypto liquidity with traditional fintech, develops enterprise financial products with SOL as underlying asset; innovates low-barrier crypto asset treasury services |
| 8 | iSpecimen Inc. | 1,000,000 | $192.3M | Healthcare | Deploys blockchain for medical specimen circulation, uses treasury for R&D support; innovates in trusted medical data exchange and assetization |
| 9 | Yueda Digital Holding | 749,965 | $144.2M | Digital & AI-Driven | Integrates SOL reserves into AI-driven digital asset operations; innovation in automated asset management and digital revenue sharing |
| 10 | Sol Strategies Inc. | 525,500 | $101M | Digital Asset Investment | Core focus on Solana on-chain asset investment management; innovation in enterprise funds directly holding, staking, and participating in on-chain governance and node operations |
Source: rwa.xyz
DAT Analysis
Compared to BTC and ETH, SOL offers higher real on-chain yields:
Multicoin Capital notes that SOL provides yields absent in BTC and ETH. SOL stakers earn higher average annual returns than Bitcoin. SOL staking yields approximately 8% annually, with about 6.19% from inflation issuance and the remaining 1.86% from real on-chain economic activity and MEV. This cash flow driven by actual transaction behavior and MEV makes SOL more attractive as a long-term capital and DAT underlying asset.
DAT companies achieve higher capital utilization:
DeFi facilitates direct lending through blockchain and smart contracts, eliminating traditional banking intermediaries, thus significantly reducing operational and matching costs.
By exploiting the spread between traditional bank financing costs for public companies and DeFi financing costs, arbitrage opportunities emerge. DeFi offers a network-native financing model without intermediaries, lower costs, and greater transparency, while traditional banking remains centralized, costly, and approval-heavy. This DeFi arbitrage not only offers high profit margins but also enables diverse revenue models through interactions with multiple counterparties.
2. Stablecoin Ecosystem: Core of Payment Infrastructure
Explosive Supply Growth
Total Solana stablecoin supply surged from $5.2 billion at end-2024 to $16 billion
Year-over-year growth of 170%, making it the third-largest stablecoin chain after Ethereum and Tron
USDC dominates ($10.6 billion), with USDT growing rapidly ($4.5 billion)
The early 2025 surge in Solana stablecoins coincided with the launch of Donald Trump's meme coin $TRUMP, triggering a wave of capital inflow. The Trump meme coin crossed boundaries, engaging political, financial, and entertainment circles, quickly breaking traditional crypto community barriers and injecting substantial liquidity and new community energy into Solana and the broader industry.
Simultaneously, new regulations like the U.S. GENIUS Act brought compliance benefits to the stablecoin industry, sharply increasing corporate and user issuance and usage of compliant stablecoins on Solana.
Source: https://defillama.com/
3. Payment Infrastructure: From Pilot to Production Deployment
Payment Infrastructure: From Pilot to Production Deployment
In 2025, Visa officially announced integrating Solana into its stablecoin settlement platform, marking Solana's transition from early experimentation to traditional financial production environments. This milestone places Solana alongside Ethereum, Stellar, and Avalanche in supporting real-time card settlement services for major stablecoins like USDC and EURC.
Visa's multi-chain, multi-currency stablecoin settlement architecture enhances Solana's on-chain liquidity and payment efficiency, offering banks, fintech companies, and merchants faster, lower-cost payment experiences.
Rapid Payment Scale Breakthrough
Monthly stablecoin transaction volume on Solana has reached $50 billion, with daily active users between 3-4 million, demonstrating strong user base and capital momentum.
With growing merchant acceptance, over 6,000 merchants accept crypto payments via Solana Pay, with fee rates reduced to approximately 1%, significantly promoting crypto payment adoption and practical application.
Real-World Business Use Cases
Mastercard partnered with MoonPay to connect 3.5 billion Mastercard cards to Solana wallets, enabling seamless consumer interaction with the Solana ecosystem using credit cards, facilitating daily digital asset usage.
E-commerce platform Helio collaborated with Shopify to launch instant crypto checkout solutions, effectively avoiding chargeback risks in traditional payments and providing safer, more convenient payment experiences for online retailers and consumers.
Western Union announced launching USDPT dollar stablecoin on Solana, expected in H1 2026, offering over 100 million customers more convenient international remittance services while significantly reducing costs and accelerating transaction speeds.
Below is a simple comparison:
| System | Confirmation Time | Cost per Transaction | Availability | 2025 Actual Performance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solana Stablecoin | 2-3 seconds | $0.00025 | 24/7 | Daily processing $2 billion in transfers |
| Traditional Bank Wire | 1-5 days | $20-50 + hidden fees | Weekdays | Cross-border payment costs reduced by 99.5% |
| Visa/Mastercard | T+3 settlement | 1.5% + $0.20 | Merchant network | Solana achieves 100x cost advantage |
In summary, stablecoin settlement integration has propelled Solana's payment infrastructure from pilot stages to large-scale commercial deployment. Coupled with growing on-chain transaction volume and rich ecosystem partnerships, this solidifies Solana's position as a next-generation global payment network.
4. Traditional Finance Integration: Bridge for Trillion-Dollar Assets
R3 Corda Bridging: Deployed Solution
On September 4, 2025, R3 Labs officially launched, bridging $17 billion in RWA assets from the Corda network to Solana via native interoperability:
Instant Availability: Bonds, funds, etc., can trade on Solana 24/7
Trustless: Native cross-chain, no third-party custody required
Scale Effect: Connects institutional clients like DTCC, Nasdaq
Institutional-Grade Custody Solutions
Helius: Manages 13 billion SOL delegated staking, providing enterprise-grade services for The Solana Company and others
Anchorage Digital: Offers federally chartered SOL custody, integrating Jupiter DEX for DeFi access anchorage
BitGo: Added Solana support, serving institutional ETFs and corporate treasuries
5. ETF Progress
Global Solana ETF Compliance Overview
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