1. The Crypto Industry is Completing its Leap from Experiment to Industry

This article is from Tiger Research. New technologies typically go through four stages as they transition from experiment to industry: the experimental phase, the overheating phase, the regulatory intervention phase, and the industry formation phase. The internet completed its experiment in the 1990s, experienced the overheating of the internet bubble, and eventually developed into a mature industry following the bursting of the bubble and the establishment of regulations and standards. Financial technology and artificial intelligence are advancing along the same path, though the pace and forms are different.

The crypto industry is currently in a transitional area between the third and fourth stages. After the birth of Bitcoin, a small group of developers validated its potential in payments and settlements (experimental phase). The ICO boom in 2017 and the DeFi wave in 2021 saw investors repeatedly flood in and exit (overheating phase). The collapse of FTX in 2022 was both a peak and a turning point. After going through multiple reshuffles, speculative demand was filtered out, real use cases were validated, and U.S. regulators began to shift towards formalization rather than permissiveness or suppression (regulatory intervention phase).

Because the crypto industry attempts to directly replace core financial functions such as settlement, payment, and issuance, it has generated greater friction with traditional financial institutions, resulting in a longer absorption time. Today, the crypto industry has finally reached the intersection of regulatory intervention and industry formation.

Progress on the regulatory front is significant. The United States Congress passed the GENIUS Act, which clarified the legal status of stablecoins. In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC released joint interpretative guidance, recognizing 16 assets, including Solana (SOL), as digital commodities, categorizing assets into five classes, abandoning the old "security/non-security" binary classification, and formally excluding protocol staking from securities law regulation.

Institutional adoption is accelerating continuously. The market for tokenized real world assets (RWA) grew by approximately 257% within 15 months, increasing from $5.4 billion at the beginning of 2025 to $19.3 billion by the end of March 2026; when including stablecoins, the total on-chain asset scale is nearing $300 billion.

This is not yet enough to be called a mature industry, but industry formation has already begun in tandem with regulatory construction.

2. Internet Capital Markets: The Ultimate Form of the Crypto Industry

After entering the industrial phase, the future that the crypto industry points to is a reconstruction of the capital markets themselves. This future can be defined as "Internet Capital Markets" (ICM): a capital market where the issuance, trading, and settlement of assets are completed entirely on a single public chain.

Today's capital markets operate on architectures designed before the birth of the internet. When buying or selling a stock, the asset and funds do not complete their transfer at the moment of execution. Clearinghouses take on performance risk between buyers and sellers, requiring both parties to pay margin, which is locked until settlement is complete. In the U.S. market, transfer by custodians is not completed until the next business day after execution. Since brokers, exchanges, clearinghouses, and custodians each maintain independent ledgers, they must reconcile with each other daily, and any discrepancies delay settlement. Cross-border transactions also add currency conversion and various national custodians, which can stretch settlement times to T+3 or even longer. This architecture, designed for an era when counterparties did not trust one another, has itself become a cost.

In the Internet Capital Markets, code takes over the role of clearinghouses. Payments from buyers and assets from sellers are both placed in smart contracts, and the two transfers are executed as a single transaction. If either party's conditions are not met, the entire transaction is automatically canceled, eliminating the scenario where only one party’s funds flow out. Since performance risk is eliminated at the code level, clearinghouses no longer require margin; and due to all participants sharing the same ledger in real-time, there is no need for reconciliation between institutions. Execution and settlement are completed within seconds.

The driving entities of this transformation are expanding from crypto startups to traditional financial institutions. Those institutions that earn income through multi-layer intermediary structures are now participating in this shift themselves. History repeatedly shows that at each turning point of infrastructure upgrades, later-following institutions either face higher costs or lose leadership. The transition to electronic trading in the 1990s is a typical case; large institutions relying on floor trading initially resisted electronic platforms like Island ECN and Instinet until those platforms became standard, after which they passively followed through acquisitions and absorption. The transformation in financial technology is no different.

This transformation is advancing fastest in the United States. Since the dollar became the reserve currency under the Bretton Woods system in 1944, global trade and financial transactions have been priced and settled in dollars. CHIPS processes over $2.2 trillion in payments every business day. The SEC's information disclosure standards have become a reference for capital market systems in other countries. Over 99% of stablecoins are pegged to the dollar. The U.S. is replicating the same model within Internet Capital Markets.

3. Solana: The Concrete Realization of Internet Capital Markets

In the landscape of U.S. Internet Capital Markets, Solana is a public chain network that integrates technological foundation, institutional practices, and regulatory design.

Solana's technological foundation has been tested in the retail market. The DeFi demand in 2021 caused network overload, and Solana viewed this as an opportunity to improve throughput and transaction scheduling. During the meme coin cycle of 2023, it verified its throughput claims by sustaining high volumes of retail traffic for long periods. In October 2025, a market crash coincided with an AWS outage, causing transaction fees on other chains to spike to $100 each, while Solana continued to operate with a fee of $0.0013 per transaction, without any interruptions. The stability of infrastructure required for institutional finance was first validated through stress testing in the retail environment.

In 2025, Solana established "Building Internet Capital Markets" as its official strategy, shifting its focus to institutional payments and asset tokenization. The Token-2022 standard introduced functionality for freezing, confiscation, whitelist management, and confidential balances as code embedded in the tokens themselves. Issuers can meet compliance requirements internally within the tokens, solving the core needs of finance regarding asset holdings and transaction qualifications at the protocol level.

On this infrastructure, seven major U.S. financial institutions initiated proofs of concept or completed actual transactions on Solana: J.P. Morgan, State Street, Citi, Franklin Templeton, Visa, PayPal, and Western Union. Three of these are among the eight global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Solana Policy Institute (SPI) was established in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 2025, recruiting the former CEO of the DeFi Education Fund and the former CEO of the Blockchain Association. It did not wait for legislation to pass before reacting but proactively submitted a pilot framework named "Project Open" to the SEC's crypto working group, attempting to propose regulatory precedents while advancing business diversification and regulatory formulation.

4. Institutional Practices: Case Analysis in Four Areas

Institutional participation in Solana Internet Capital Markets is unfolding along multiple lines, but not all participants have aligned goals. Understanding this layered activity requires an analytical framework built around two core axes: regulatory posture (compliance-driven vs. frontier-defined) and depth of value chain integration (packaging layer vs. native layer).

4.1 Banks and Capital Markets: The Hidden Cost of Settlement Delays

The banking and capital markets sector encompasses bond issuance, trade finance, and cash management, serving as the core revenue source for traditional financial institutions and also directly reflecting the cost advantage of Internet Capital Markets. All three subfields share a common key issue: there is a time lag between trade execution and the actual movement of funds.

According to estimates by Tiger Research, in the U.S. Treasury market alone, the opportunity cost of cash idling due to settlement delays is approximately $32 billion annually; if extended to the entire U.S. fixed income market, the annual opportunity cost exceeds $45 billion. The speed limitations of the existing financial system are imposing significant hidden costs on market participants.

On the Internet Capital Markets infrastructure, this chronic time lapse disappears. Atomic settlement (DvP) bundles asset transfer and payment into a single transaction and processes it in real time. Clearinghouses are no longer needed, and the reconciliation processes run by various institutions have also vanished. Execution and clearing are completed within seconds (T+0).

State Street × Galaxy: On-chain Fund Management (SWEEP). SWEEP, launched in May 2026 on Solana, is an on-chain fund aimed at institutional investors, accepting deposits in stablecoins (PYUSD, USDC) or fiat currency, and investing in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds to generate returns. It realizes the concept of "automated cash concentration accounts" from traditional finance in the form of an on-chain fund. For Web3 foundations holding large amounts of stablecoins, using traditional financial services under the existing infrastructure requires first converting stablecoins to dollars, incurring conversion fees and time delays. SWEEP allows institutions to directly deposit and redeem Treasury yield assets from their wallets. Ondo Finance's flagship fund OUSG made an anchor investment of approximately $200 million at the time SWEEP launched, accounting for about 26% of its then TVL.

J.P. Morgan × Galaxy: Commercial Paper Issuance (USCP). In December 2025, J.P. Morgan arranged for the issuance of $50 million in U.S. commercial paper on the Solana public chain. This was not a simulated test, but one of the earliest genuine debt securities transactions on the public chain. J.P. Morgan, as the arranger, directly created USCP tokens on the Solana blockchain, with Coinbase and Franklin Templeton as the main investors and buyers paying with USDC (issued by Circle), while Coinbase provided private key custody and USDC deposit/withdrawal infrastructure. By combining the stablecoin payment network with on-chain atomic settlement (DvP), what originally required T+1 to T+2 through multiple intermediaries for corporate financing was compressed into real-time completion.

Citi × PwC: Trade Finance Tokenization (Bills of Exchange). Citi and PwC completed an internal proof of concept on Solana that transformed traditional bills of exchange into tokenized digital assets. In a simulated environment, the entire lifecycle of bills of exchange (issuance, financing, circulation, settlement) was automated via smart contracts, reducing settlement time from several days to minutes, and eliminating manual reconciliation costs. This case has strong reference significance for Asian financial markets, where global trade hubs are highly concentrated.

4.2 Payments and Stablecoins: Redesigning the Settlement Paradigm

Western Union: Global Remittances (USDPT). In May 2026, this 175-year-old company, which handles approximately $150 billion in cross-border remittances annually across over 200 countries, issued the dollar payment token USDPT on Solana. In the traditional agent banking system, each intermediary bank only processes within its own systems and working hours, with settlements typically taking one to two business days, completely halting during weekends and holidays. To respond to real-time payment requests from various local countries immediately, Western Union must pre-lock large amounts of dollars in local bank accounts, with these pre-deposited agent bank account balances locked and non-earning until transfers occur.

USDPT fundamentally redesigns this settlement process, shifting the paradigm from "pre-reserving funds" to "real-time on-demand supply." When the cash inventory of a country agent falls below a threshold, the U.S. headquarters finance team immediately issues USDPT through Anchorage Digital to that agent's institutional chain wallet. Regardless of weekends, nights, or holidays, final settlement can be quickly completed based on Solana's 0.4-second block time. Western Union is also building a Digital Asset Network (DAN), planning to promote consumer-facing stablecoin payment service "Stable by Western Union" to over 40 countries within 2026.

Fiserv: Financial Institution White-label Stablecoin (FIUSD). Fiserv announced it will launch a FIUSD white-label stablecoin platform, officially launching on Solana in July 2026. Under the white-label structure, Fiserv provides technological infrastructure and dollar-backed systems, allowing various financial institutions to issue and offer stablecoins under their own brands. Banks do not need to build their own blockchain infrastructure to offer digital dollars to customers. The Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the U.S.) has announced it will launch "Roughrider Coin" on this platform. Fiserv's multi-party network covers approximately 10,000 financial institution clients and six million merchants, processing about 90 billion transactions annually, and plans to provide FIUSD to member financial institutions' clients free of charge using existing technology.

This structure can be directly referenced by Asian financial institutions. For South Korea, the white-label model precisely mirrors the current discussions surrounding whether banks or non-bank entities can issue stablecoins; once the Financial Services Commission (FSC) delineates boundaries and establishes rules for won valuation, this model can be transplanted.

4.3 Tokenization of Real World Assets: A Closed Loop from Issuance to Circulation

Orca × Streamex: Compliant RWA Distribution (GLDY). The market for tokenized listed stocks has long faced a disconnect between issuance and distribution. Tokenized assets related to listed stocks have multiple exchanges providing secondary trading paths, but non-stock tokenized securities such as bonds, commodities, and private loans lack liquidity infrastructure controlled by the issuer based on qualification access after issuance. Issuance technology is advancing, but distribution infrastructure has not kept pace.

In May 2026, Orca launched a permissionless AMM infrastructure that allows issuers to create customizable permission pools according to the requirements of their regulated assets. Nasdaq-listed company Streamex was the first issuer to utilize this scheme to provide secondary liquidity for its gold yield token GLDY. The operation of the GLDY permission pool is divided into three stages: all investor wallets are default frozen, only wallets that pass Streamex's KYC verification have their access control layers automatically unfrozen on-chain; after being unfrozen, wallets conduct peer-to-peer real-time transactions in the Orca AMM pool without the need for brokers or auditors to intervene; unlike traditional gold investment products restricted by exchange hours, GLDY trades around the clock on Solana, with yields from Monetary Metals' gold leasing contracts paid directly to GLDY holders.

This token-level freeze/unfreeze control mechanism is not limited to gold; it can be directly applied to treasury bonds, corporate bonds, and private credit as any regulated asset. This is why Orca is proposing this structure as the trading infrastructure proposal for Project Open's pilot framework.

Apollo: Private Credit Tokenization (ACRED). Although it has high yields, the traditional private loan market faces two major structural barriers: high minimum investment amounts which open it only to institutions and ultra-high net worth individuals, and a lack of liquidity binding investments to maturity. In January 2025, Apollo issued a tokenized tiered fund ACRED based on its diversified credit fund (ADCF) through Securitize, with a minimum investment of $50,000. Within the Solana ecosystem, investors convert ACRED into sACRED wrapped tokens, depositing them into an institution-specific lending pool as collateral, borrowing stablecoins at an approximate 60% collateralization ratio (borrowing costs approximately 3% to 4%), and then using the borrowed stablecoins to buy back ACRED, effectively leveraging returns from approximately 7.4% to around 12% to 16%. RedStone Oracles provide real-time ACRED price data, and Gauntlet automatically manages liquidation conditions and rebalancing timing.

This leveraged structure exists due to the cost of each transaction on Solana being less than $0.001 and the collateral setup/release speeds being in seconds. It is nearly impossible to operate the same structure on infrastructure that requires days to settle or incurs high costs for each operation.

Figure Technology: Liquidity Expansion for Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC). Figure is the largest non-bank issuer of HELOCs in the U.S.; by December 2025, it had accumulated over $19 billion in on-chain loans and issued AAA-rated securitized products underwritten by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, and Barclays multiple times. It initially tokenized HELOC on its own chain Provenance and operated the Demo Prime funding pool, but its closed ecosystem lacked the DeFi liquidity infrastructure necessary for building leverage, limiting the efficiency of capital turnover. In December 2025, Figure launched the PRIME token, bridging the loan yields from Provenance to Solana via Chainlink CCIP, utilizing the Kamino lending protocol to support leverage of up to nine times, with Orca providing AMM depth for the PRIME/PYUSD pool.

Figure's choice of Solana was not out of technological preference but for capital efficiency. The 9% yield of Demo Prime minus the 6% borrowing cost from Kamino amplifies the net profit margin through leverage. The economic viability of this strategy would not hold unless collateral setup and release could be completed in seconds for less than $0.001 on Solana. Even with its own chain, connecting to public chain liquidity is equally important.

4.4 Infrastructure Diffusion: Formation of Network Effects

The first three areas deal with transformations in their respective fields, while infrastructure diffusion addresses the nodes where these transformations converge. Banks issuing bonds, remittance companies settling in stablecoins, and asset management firms tokenizing funds are not advancing independently; they are happening simultaneously on the same infrastructure.

Diffusion is divided into three levels. At the issuance level, PayPal, Fiserv, Circle, and Tether are issuing stablecoins or operating issuance infrastructure on Solana, with multiple competitive issuers coexisting in the same network. At the settlement level, Visa has extended stablecoin settlement to Solana, Worldpay has migrated merchant transaction settlements onto the Solana network, and YouTube is paying U.S. creators using PYUSD on Solana. At the touchpoint level, SoFi allows 14.7 million customers to purchase SOL directly from bank accounts and operates a bank-issued stablecoin SoFiUSD, becoming the first federally chartered bank under OCC supervision to post its liabilities as stablecoins on the Solana public chain; Bullish employs Solana stablecoins as the primary settlement channel in over 50 jurisdictions and has processed $1.15 billion in IPO financing on the Solana network.

When issuance, settlement, and touchpoints operate on the same network, network effects emerge. Tokens issued by banks are settled by payment companies, and consumers hold those assets in bank applications, forming a closed loop. The more participants there are, the greater the utility for each participant. The formation of Internet Capital Markets will accelerate at the moment this closed loop crosses a critical point.

5. Regulatory Landscape: Established and Unresolved

Fields already entering the regulatory framework have a wide coverage. In terms of bank custody of crypto assets, after the repeal of SAB 121, crypto assets were classified as off-balance-sheet assets, and major custodial banks such as BNY Mellon and State Street have launched digital asset trust services. In terms of identification as digital commodities, 16 assets, including SOL, have been confirmed as digital commodities, and protocol staking has been excluded from securities law, allowing institutional investors legal safeguards for purchasing, holding, and staking securely. On stablecoins, the GENIUS Act defines stablecoins as independent asset types rather than securities or deposits, imposing federal licensing standards on issuers. Regarding tokenized securities, in March 2026 the SEC approved Nasdaq to trade certain securities in tokenized form, with DTCC confirming the initiation of a limited pilot in July and full launch in October, covering Russell 1000 constituents, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bonds. Concerning perpetual futures, the CFTC has approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures contract, taking the first step to introduce offshore perpetual futures liquidity (approximately $61.7 trillion in 2025) into the U.S. regulated system.

Unresolved frontier areas are equally critical. The free trading of stocks on public chains is currently limited to non-U.S. residents (Reg S) or accredited investors (Reg D); although the SEC has discussed a "third-party stock tokenization" innovation exemption without approval from the issuing company, strong opposition from the traditional financial sector (Nasdaq, SIFMA, etc.) against liquidity fragmentation leaves final approval pending. Regarding DEXs, the SEC released temporary guidance on five-year sunset clauses in April 2026, but key regulatory gaps remain, such as the assignment of anti-money laundering obligations and order processing responsibilities. On the interest payments of stablecoins, the GENIUS Act strictly prohibits issuers from paying any form of earnings to holders, with the banking industry even pushing for the closure of third-party channels.

The CLARITY Act is the key legislation to drive comprehensive solutions to these issues, defining the overall market structure for digital assets, creating a regulatory framework for spot markets of digital commodities, and guiding the SEC and CFTC in rulemaking to allow enterprises to operate on public chains. However, the probability of this bill passing within 2026 is estimated at about 50% or lower. There are bipartisan disagreements regarding ethical provisions that restrict presidents and senior officials from profiting from crypto businesses. The legislative window of about four weeks from mid-July to early August in the Senate essentially represents the last deadline for passage this year. Missing this window would push the timeline into the midterm election stage of 2026, making it even harder to reach consensus in a pre-election landscape.

6. Technical Reasons Behind Institutional Choices

Global financial institutions are not choosing Solana out of preference but because it meets the technological demands of institutional finance.

Settlement Economics. Solana's final confirmation time is about 0.5 seconds, with an average transaction fee of $0.0013. If each setup and release of collateral incurs costs of several dollars or takes a day to settle, leverage strategies would be swallowed by costs before yielding any returns.

Programmable Compliance. The Token-2022 standard embeds features such as freezing, confiscation, whitelist access, and zero-knowledge proof encrypted balances at the token level, transforming compliance from a reactive measure dependent on external systems into a proactive design built into the protocol layer. Transaction amounts are preserved in the public ledger for sources and destinations but are encrypted with zero-knowledge proofs; only the sender, receiver, and designated auditors can see the amounts. This design ensures both auditability and confidentiality.

Institutional-Grade Stability and Evolving Infrastructure. Addressing the vulnerability of a single validator client, Solana is evolving towards a multi-architecture with independent validator clients. The technical roadmap aims to reduce final confirmation times from the current 0.5 seconds to around 150 milliseconds while introducing identity verification structures before transaction execution at the protocol layer.

Complete Operational Sovereignty: Contra. For institutions where all transactions and balances cannot be exposed on public ledgers, or where internal control verification and governance are needed, Solana offers a Contra option independent of the public mainnet, using the performance foundation verified on the public network while resetting operational conditions to meet institutional needs.

7. Strategic Execution Framework for Asian Institutions

Asian financial institutions have moved past the stage of designing infrastructure from scratch as pioneers. A pragmatic path is to be fast followers, adopting infrastructure and regulatory references validated by the U.S. market to reduce trial and error costs. The standard for deciding to enter is not whether policies exist, but whether they can be genuinely implemented: is there clear legislation, guidelines, and licensing systems, and has market infrastructure (custody, settlement, disclosure) been synchronized? These are the key distinctions between what can currently be commercialized and what cannot.

Executable Phase (Singapore MAS, Hong Kong SFC/HKMA, Japan FSA, UAE ADGM/VARA): Clear licensing systems and market infrastructure are in place, and commercialization can be initiated immediately. Representative areas include stablecoin payments (licensed) and spot ETFs. The risk here is delay, not entry. Institutions that enter first can lock in operational records and liquidity partners early, while later entrants bear the costs of the gap.

Transitional Phase (Korea FSC/FSS, Thailand SEC, Malaysia SC, parts of India): Policy direction is clear, but detailed rules and licensing requirements have yet to be determined. Representative areas include tokenized stocks, stablecoins, secondary markets for STOs, and digital asset market structure laws. What is currently needed is not full commercialization but a framework that can be immediately transformed into commercial operations upon regulatory confirmation. Korean institutions are in this phase. Preparing only after regulatory confirmation is too late, as institutions that have arranged for licenses, systems, partners, and internal compliance will not be on the same starting line as those that have not done so. For institutions facing slow domestic regulatory advancement, offshore pathways are effective alternatives: setting up entities in jurisdictions with complete frameworks, such as Singapore or the UAE, to conduct pilots and build compliance systems and counterparty networks, and then transitioning capabilities back home when domestic regulations are ready.

Exploratory Phase (Indonesia, Vietnam, parts of the Philippines, and other emerging markets): Legal definitions, asset classifications, and investor protection standards are still not clear, and jurisdictional authority among regulators has yet to be clarified. Small-scale experiments should be conducted to accumulate technical and market data while maintaining the capacity for rapid expansion upon confirmation of standards and regulatory direction. In a phase where asset classification is not yet determined, investing resources in one party alone poses the greatest risk.

8. Conclusion: The Window is Opening, but for How Long is Uncertain

Internet Capital Markets are no longer a concept but a running reality. Global institutions with different objectives, such as J.P. Morgan, State Street, and Franklin Templeton, are choosing Solana not out of preference but because it meets their technical and structural needs: embedded institutional compliance capabilities (Token-2022), throughput records that withstand extreme traffic and sudden market fluctuations, and a comprehensive system internally accumulated from Washington policy participation to real-time settlement and clearing infrastructure.

These three points are not a judgment on one infrastructure being superior to another but rather an observation of where institutional capital is genuinely converging. Validation does not manifest in price but in who places what where.

The variable for Asian institutions is no longer "whether to enter," but the order of entry and points of entry. Reference cases have been validated, and standards have yet to solidify. This interval of "validation completed but standards not yet solidified" is a window available for fast followers. It is uncertain how long it will remain open.

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