1. The Crypto Industry Is Completing Its Transition from Experiment to Industry

This article is from Tiger Research. New technologies typically go through four stages as they move from experiment to industry: the experimental phase, the overheating phase, the regulatory intervention phase, and the industry formation phase. The internet completed its experiments in the 1990s, went through the overheating of the dot-com bubble, and eventually developed into a mature industry after the bubble burst as regulations and standards were established. Fintech and artificial intelligence have followed the same path, only with different rhythms and forms.

The crypto industry is currently in the transitional zone between the third and fourth phases. After Bitcoin's birth, a small group of developers verified its potential in payments and settlements (experimental phase). During the 2017 ICO boom and the 2021 DeFi wave, investors repeatedly rushed in and pulled out (overheating phase). The collapse of FTX in 2022 was both the peak and a turning point. After several rounds of reshuffling, speculative demand was filtered out, real use cases were validated, and U.S. regulatory agencies began moving toward formalization rather than laissez-faire or suppression (regulatory intervention phase).

Because the crypto industry seeks to directly replace core financial functions such as settlement, payment, and issuance, it has generated greater friction with traditional financial institutions, and thus has taken longer to be absorbed. Today, the crypto industry has finally arrived at the intersection of regulatory intervention and industry formation.

Regulatory progress has been significant. The U.S. Congress passed the GENIUS Act, clarifying the legal status of stablecoins. In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC issued joint interpretive guidance, recognizing 16 assets, including Solana (SOL), as digital commodities, classifying assets into five categories, abandoning the old binary "security/non-security" classification, and formally excluding protocol staking from securities law oversight.

Institutional adoption continues to accelerate. The tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market grew about 257% in 15 months, rising from $5.4 billion at the beginning of 2025 to $19.3 billion at the end of March 2026; if stablecoins are included, the total scale of on-chain assets has approached $300 billion.

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

2. Internet Capital Markets: The Endgame for the Crypto Industry

The future that the crypto industry points to after entering the industrial phase is the 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 all completed on a single public blockchain.

Today's capital markets run on an architecture designed before the internet was born. When buying or selling a stock, the assets and funds are not settled at the moment of execution. A clearing house stands between the buyer and seller to bear performance risk, requiring both parties to post margin, which is locked up until settlement is completed. In the U.S. market, the transfer of ownership at the depository is not completed until the next business day after execution. Because brokers, exchanges, clearing houses, and depositories each maintain independent ledgers, they must reconcile with each other daily, and any discrepancies delay settlement. Cross-border transactions additionally involve currency exchange and various national depositories, which can extend settlement times to T+3 or even longer. This architecture, designed for an era when counterparties did not trust each other, has itself become a cost today.

In Internet Capital Markets, code takes over the role of the clearing house. The buyer's payment and the seller's asset are placed into a smart contract simultaneously, and both transfers are executed as a single transaction. If either party's conditions are not met, the entire transaction is automatically canceled, leaving no scenario where only one side's funds flow out. Since performance risk is eliminated at the code level, a clearing house is no longer required to demand margin; since all participants share the same ledger in real time, there is no need for inter-institutional reconciliation. Execution and settlement are completed synchronously within seconds.

The entities driving this transformation are expanding from crypto startups to traditional financial institutions. Those institutions that once earned revenue through multi-layered intermediary structures are now themselves participating in this shift. History has repeatedly proven: at every infrastructure inflection point, institutions that follow late either pay higher costs or lose their leadership position. The shift to electronic trading in the 1990s is a classic example: large institutions reliant on floor trading initially resisted electronic platforms like Island ECN and Instinet, only to follow passively through acquisitions and assimilation after these platforms became the standard. The fintech transformation followed the same pattern.

This transformation is progressing fastest in the United States. After the dollar became the reserve currency under the 1944 Bretton Woods system, global trade and financial transactions were denominated and settled in dollars. CHIPS processes over $2.2 trillion in payments every business day. The SEC's disclosure standards became a reference for capital market regimes in other countries. Over 99% of stablecoins are denominated in dollars. The United States is replicating the same pattern in Internet Capital Markets.

3. Solana: The Concrete Realization of Internet Capital Markets

In the landscape of U.S. Internet Capital Markets, Solana is the public blockchain network that brings together technical foundations, institutional practice, and regulatory design.

Solana's technical foundation was tested and refined in the retail market. When DeFi demand caused network overloads in 2021, Solana viewed it as an opportunity to improve throughput and transaction scheduling. During the 2023 meme coin cycle, it validated its throughput claims by sustaining high-intensity retail traffic over a long period. In October 2025, a market crash coincided with an AWS outage; transaction fees on other chains soared to $100 per transaction, while Solana continued to operate without interruption at a fee of $0.0013 per transaction. The infrastructure stability required for institutional finance was first verified through stress tests in a 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 launched for this purpose embeds functions like freeze, confiscation, whitelist management, and confidential balance capabilities directly into the token code itself. Issuers can implement compliance requirements within the token without needing external systems, addressing the core financial needs for asset holding and trading eligibility at the protocol layer.

On this infrastructure, seven major U.S. financial institutions have launched proofs of concept or completed actual transactions on Solana: J.P. Morgan, State Street, Citi, Franklin Templeton, Visa, PayPal, and Western Union. Three of them are among the eight U.S. Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs).

At the same time, the Solana Policy Institute (SPI) was established in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 2025, recruiting a former CEO of the DeFi Education Fund and a former CEO of the Blockchain Association. Instead of waiting for legislation to pass before reacting, it proactively submitted a pilot framework named "Project Open" to the SEC's Crypto Task Force, trying to set a regulatory precedent first while simultaneously advancing business diversification and regulatory formulation.

4. Institutional Practice: Case Studies Across Four Major Areas

Institutional participation in Solana's Internet Capital Markets is unfolding across multiple lines, but not all participants share the same objectives. Understanding this layered activity requires an analytical framework built around two core axes: regulatory posture (compliance-driven vs. frontier-defining) and depth of value chain integration (packaging layer vs. native layer).

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

The banking and capital markets sector encompasses bond issuance, trade finance, and treasury management. It is a core revenue source for traditional financial institutions and the area where the cost advantages of Internet Capital Markets are most directly reflected. The three sub-sectors share a key problem: the time lag between transaction execution and the actual movement of funds.

According to Tiger Research's estimates, the opportunity cost of idle funds due to settlement delays is roughly $32 billion annually in the U.S. Treasury market alone; 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 massive hidden costs on market participants.

On internet-native capital market infrastructure, this chronic time lag disappears. Atomic settlement (DvP) bundles asset transfer and payment into a single transaction and processes them in real time. Clearinghouses are no longer needed, and the reconciliation processes that institutions run separately also disappear. Execution and settlement are completed within seconds (T+0).

State Street × Galaxy: On-chain Treasury Management (SWEEP) . Launched on Solana in May 2026, SWEEP is an on-chain fund for institutional investors, accepting stablecoin (PYUSD, USDC) or fiat deposits and investing in short-term U.S. Treasury securities to generate yield. It takes the traditional finance concept of an “automatic sweep account” and implements it as an on-chain fund. For Web3 foundations holding large amounts of stablecoins, using traditional financial services under existing infrastructure requires first converting stablecoins to U.S. dollars, incurring conversion fees and time delays. SWEEP allows institutions to deposit and redeem Treasury yield–generating assets directly from their wallets. Ondo Finance’s flagship fund OUSG made an anchor investment of approximately $200 million at SWEEP’s launch, representing about 26% of its total value locked (TVL) at the time.

J.P. Morgan × Galaxy: Commercial Paper Issuance (USCP) . In December 2025, J.P. Morgan arranged a $50 million U.S. commercial paper issuance on the Solana public blockchain. This was not a simulation or test, but one of the earliest real debt security transactions on a public blockchain. As arranger, J.P. Morgan created USCP tokens directly on the Solana blockchain. Coinbase and Franklin Templeton acted as primary investors and buyers, paying with USDC (issued by Circle). Coinbase provided private key custody and USDC on-/off-ramp infrastructure. By combining the stablecoin payment network with on-chain atomic settlement (delivery versus payment, DvP), the corporate funding cycle—which previously required T+1 to T+2 and multiple intermediaries—was compressed to real-time completion.

Citi × PwC: Trade Finance Tokenization (Bills of Exchange) . Citi and PwC completed an internal proof-of-concept on Solana for tokenizing traditional bills of exchange into digital assets. In the simulated environment, the full lifecycle of a bill of exchange (issuance, financing, circulation, settlement) was automated through smart contracts, reducing settlement time from days to minutes and cutting manual reconciliation costs to zero. This case has strong relevance for Asian financial markets, given that global trade hubs are heavily concentrated in Asia.

4.2 Payments and Stablecoins: Redesigning the Settlement Paradigm

Western Union: Global Remittances (USDPT) . In May 2026, the 175-year-old company that processes around $150 billion in cross-border remittances annually across more than 200 countries, issued the U.S. dollar payment token USDPT on Solana. In the traditional correspondent banking system, each intermediary bank processes transactions only within its own systems and business hours; settlement typically takes one to two business days and stops entirely over weekends and holidays. To immediately respond to real-time payment requests in each host country, Western Union had to pre-fund large amounts of U.S. dollars in local bank accounts in each country—these prefunded correspondent account balances were locked up and earned no yield until a transfer occurred.

USDPT fundamentally redesigns this settlement process, shifting the paradigm from “pre-funded reserves” to “real-time, on-demand supply.” When a local agent’s cash inventory falls below a threshold, the U.S. headquarters treasury team instantly sends funds to that agent’s institutional on-chain wallet via USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital. Settlement is finalized quickly—whether on weekends, at night, or on holidays—leveraging Solana’s 0.4-second block time. Western Union is also building the Digital Asset Network (DAN), planning to roll out its consumer-facing stablecoin payment service, “Stable by Western Union,” to more than 40 countries by the end of 2026.

Fiserv: White-Label Stablecoins for Financial Institutions (FIUSD) . Fiserv announced the launch of the FIUSD white-label stablecoin platform, with plans to go live on Solana in July 2026. Under the white-label structure, Fiserv provides the technology infrastructure and U.S. dollar backing system, while each financial institution issues and offers stablecoins under its own brand. Banks can offer their own digital dollars to customers without needing to build blockchain infrastructure themselves. Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the U.S.) has announced it will launch “Roughrider Coin” on the platform. Fiserv’s multilateral network covers approximately 10,000 financial institution clients and 6 million merchants, processing 90 billion transactions annually. It plans to offer FIUSD at no cost to its member financial institution clients, leveraging existing technology.

This structure can be directly referenced by Asian financial institutions. For South Korea, the white-label model maps neatly onto the ongoing debate over whether banks or non-bank institutions can issue stablecoins. Once the Financial Services Commission (FSC) draws the boundaries and establishes Korean won–denominated rules, this model can be transplanted.

4.3 Real-World Asset Tokenization: Closing the Loop from Issuance to Circulation

Orca × Streamex: Compliant RWA Distribution (GLDY) . The tokenized listed equity market has long faced a disconnect between issuance and distribution. Tokenized equity-type assets have multiple exchanges offering secondary trading paths, but non-equity tokenized securities—such as bonds, commodities, and private loans—lack issuer-controlled, eligibility-gated liquidity infrastructure 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 permissioned pools according to the requirements of their regulated assets. Nasdaq-listed Streamex, as the first issuer, leveraged this solution to provide secondary liquidity for its gold yield token GLDY. The GLDY permissioned pool operates in three stages: all investor wallets are frozen by default, and only wallets that pass Streamex’s KYC verification are automatically unfrozen on the on-chain access control layer; unfrozen wallets then trade peer-to-peer in real time within the Orca AMM pool, without the need for brokers or human reviewers; unlike traditional gold investment products constrained by exchange trading hours, GLDY trades around the clock on Solana, and the yield from Monetary Metals’ gold lease contracts is paid directly to GLDY holders.

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

Apollo: Private Credit Tokenization (ACRED) . The traditional private loan market, despite its high yields, faces two structural barriers: high minimum investment amounts that open it only to institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and a lack of liquidity that locks up investments until maturity. In January 2025, Apollo issued ACRED, a tokenized feeder fund based on its Diversified Credit Fund (ADCF), via Securitize, with a minimum investment of $50,000. In the Solana ecosystem, investors convert ACRED into the sACRED wrapper token, deposit it into an institutional lending pool as collateral, borrow stablecoins at a roughly 60% collateralization ratio (borrowing cost approximately 3%–4%), then use the borrowed stablecoins to buy back ACRED and repeat the cycle. This allows effective leverage of around 2.5x, amplifying the approximately 7.4% base yield to about 12%–16%. RedStone oracles provide real-time ACRED price data, while Gauntlet automates liquidation conditions and rebalancing timing.

This leverage structure is only viable because of Solana’s sub‑$0.001 transaction fees and the speed of collateral posting/release in seconds. On infrastructure where settlement takes days or each operation incurs high costs, the same structure would be nearly impossible to operate.

Figure Technology: Expanding Liquidity for Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOC) . Figure is the largest non-bank HELOC originator in the U.S., with cumulative on-chain loans exceeding $19 billion as of December 2025, and has issued multiple AAA-rated securitizations underwritten by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, and Barclays. It originally tokenized HELOCs on its own Provenance blockchain and operated the Demo Prime pool, but the closed ecosystem lacked the DeFi liquidity infrastructure needed to construct leverage, limiting capital velocity. In December 2025, Figure launched the PRIME token, bridging loan yield rights from Provenance to Solana via Chainlink CCIP, using the Kamino lending protocol to support up to 9x leverage, with Orca providing AMM depth for the PRIME/PYUSD pool.

Figure chose Solana not out of technical preference, but for capital efficiency. The net spread of Demo Prime’s 9% yield minus Kamino’s 6% borrowing cost is magnified through leverage. Unless collateral setup and release can be completed in seconds for less than $0.001 on Solana, the economics of this strategy do not hold. Even if you already have your own chain, connecting to public-chain liquidity is equally important.

4.4 Infrastructure Diffusion: The Formation of Network Effects

The first three domains address transformation within their respective areas, while infrastructure diffusion deals with the nodes where these transformations converge. Banks issuing bonds on-chain, remittance companies settling with stablecoins, and asset managers tokenizing funds are not advancing in isolation — they are happening simultaneously on the same infrastructure.

Diffusion unfolds across three layers. At the issuance layer, PayPal, Fiserv, Circle, and Tether issue stablecoins or operate issuing infrastructure on Solana, with multiple competing issuers coexisting on the same network. At the settlement layer, Visa extended stablecoin settlement to Solana, Worldpay migrated merchant transaction settlement to the Solana network, and YouTube adopted PYUSD on Solana to pay US creators. At the touchpoint layer, SoFi enabled its 14.7 million customers to buy SOL directly from bank accounts and operates SoFiUSD, a bank-issued stablecoin, becoming the first federally chartered bank to place its own liabilities on the Solana public chain in stablecoin form under OCC regulation; Bullish adopted Solana stablecoins as the primary settlement rail across more than 50 jurisdictions and processed $1.15 billion in IPO financing on the Solana network.

Network effects emerge when issuance, settlement, and touchpoints operate on the same network. Bank-issued tokens are settled by payment companies, and consumers hold that asset in banking apps, forming a closed loop. The more participants, the greater the utility for each. The formation of an internet capital market will accelerate the moment this closed loop crosses the critical threshold.

5. Regulatory Landscape: Established and Unresolved

Areas that have entered the regulatory framework are relatively broad in coverage. On bank custody of crypto assets, following the repeal of SAB 121, crypto assets are classified as off-balance-sheet assets, and major custodian banks such as BNY Mellon and State Street have launched digital asset trust services. On digital commodity status, 16 assets including SOL have been recognized as digital commodities, protocol staking has been carved out of securities law, and institutional investors have gained legal certainty to buy, hold, and stake in a lawful and safe manner. On stablecoins, the GENIUS Act defines stablecoins as an independent asset class — neither securities nor deposits — and imposes federal licensing standards on issuers. On tokenized securities, in March 2026, the SEC approved Nasdaq to trade certain securities in tokenized form, and the DTCC confirmed it would launch a limited pilot in July with full rollout in October, covering Russell 1000 constituents, major index ETFs, and US Treasuries. On perpetual futures, the CFTC approved Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual futures contracts for the first time, marking the first step to bring offshore perpetual futures liquidity (approximately $61.7 trillion in 2025) into the US regulated system.

The unresolved frontier areas are equally critical. Free stock trading on public chains is currently limited to non-US persons (Reg S) or wealthy accredited investors (Reg D). Although the SEC has discussed an innovation exemption for “third-party stock tokenization” that does not require the issuer’s consent, strong opposition from traditional finance (Nasdaq, SIFMA, etc.) over liquidity fragmentation leaves final approval uncertain. On DEXs, the SEC issued temporary guidance with a five-year sunset clause in April 2026, but key regulatory gaps remain around the assignment of AML obligations and order-handling responsibilities. On stablecoin interest payments, the GENIUS Act strictly prohibits issuers from paying any form of yield to holders, and the banking industry is even pushing to shut down third-party channels.

The CLARITY Act is the key legislation to drive comprehensive resolution of these issues. It would define the overall market structure for digital assets, create a spot market regulatory framework for digital commodities, and direct the SEC and CFTC to conduct rulemaking that allows businesses to operate on public chains. However, the probability of the bill passing in 2026 is around 50% or lower. Bipartisan divisions exist over ethics provisions that would restrict the President and senior officials from profiting from crypto businesses. The roughly four-week legislative window in the Senate from mid-July to early August is effectively the deadline for passage this year. If that window is missed, the timeline slides into the 2026 midterm election phase, where reaching consensus in the pre-election landscape will be even more difficult.

6. The Technical Reasons Behind Institutional Choices

Global financial institutions did not choose Solana out of preference; they chose it because it meets the technical requirements of institutional finance.

Settlement economics. Solana’s finality time is approximately 0.5 seconds, with an average transaction fee of $0.0013. If each setup and release of collateral added several dollars in cost or took a day to settle, the leveraged strategy would be consumed by costs before generating any return.

Programmable compliance. The Token-2022 standard embeds features such as freeze, seizure, whitelist access, and zero-knowledge proof encrypted balances at the token layer, turning compliance from an after-the-fact measure reliant on external systems into an ex-ante design built into the protocol layer. Transaction amounts are encrypted via zero-knowledge proofs, preserving provenance and destination on the public ledger while only the sender, receiver, and designated auditors can see the amounts. This is a design that ensures both auditability and confidentiality.

Institutional-grade stability and evolving infrastructure. Addressing the vulnerability of a single validator client, Solana is moving toward a multi-architecture approach running multiple independent validator clients. The technical roadmap will shorten finality time from the current ~0.5 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds and introduce identity verification structures at the protocol layer before transaction execution.

Full operational sovereignty: Contra. For institutions where all transactions and balances cannot be exposed on the public ledger, or which need to control validation and governance internally, Solana offers the Contra option, which is independent of the public mainnet. It uses the proven performance base of the public network and simply resets the operating conditions to meet institutional requirements.

7. Strategic Execution Framework for Asian Institutions

The era when Asian financial institutions had to design infrastructure from scratch as pioneers has passed. The pragmatic path is to act as fast followers, adopting infrastructure and regulatory references proven in the US market to reduce trial-and-error costs. The criterion for deciding to enter is not whether policies exist, but whether they can actually be executed: whether there are clear laws, guidelines, and licensing regimes, and whether market infrastructure (custody, settlement, disclosure) has been built in sync. These are what distinguish what is commercially ready today from what is not.

Executable phase (Singapore MAS, Hong Kong SFC/HKMA, Japan FSA, UAE ADGM/VARA): Clear licensing regimes and market infrastructure are already in place, and commercialization can start immediately. Representative areas include licensed stablecoin payments and spot ETFs. The risk here is delay, not entry. Institutions that enter first can lock in operational records and liquidity partners ahead of others; latecomers will pay the price of that gap.

Transition phase (Korea FSC/FSS, Thailand SEC, Malaysia SC, India partial regulation): Policy direction is clear but detailed rules and licensing requirements are not yet finalized. Representative areas include tokenized stocks, stablecoins, STO secondary markets, and digital asset market structure laws. What is needed now is not full commercialization, but building a structure that can immediately convert into commercial operations upon regulatory confirmation. Korean institutions are at this stage. Waiting until regulatory confirmation to start preparing is too late, because institutions that have already arranged licenses, systems, partners, and internal compliance will not stand on the same starting line as those who have not. For institutions facing slow domestic regulatory progress, the offshore path is an effective alternative: establish an entity in a jurisdiction with a complete framework, such as Singapore or the UAE, conduct pilots, accumulate compliance systems and counterparty networks, and transfer capabilities back home when domestic regulations are ready.

Exploration phase (Indonesia, Vietnam, parts of the Philippines, and other emerging markets): Legal definitions, asset classification, and investor protection standards are still unclear, and jurisdictional boundaries among regulators have not been delineated. Small-scale experiments should be conducted to accumulate technical and market data, maintaining the ability to scale quickly once standards and regulatory direction are confirmed. At a stage where even asset classification is not yet determined, betting resources on one side is itself the greatest risk.

8. Conclusion: The Window Is Opening, but How Long It Stays Open Is Uncertain

The internet capital market is no longer a concept but a living reality. Global institutions with differing objectives—J.P. Morgan, State Street, Franklin Templeton, and others—are simultaneously choosing Solana not out of preference, but because it meets their respective technical and structural needs: institutional compliance capabilities embedded in the asset itself (Token-2022), a throughput track record tested by extreme traffic and sudden market volatility, and a complete system accumulated within a single ecosystem, spanning from Washington policy engagement to real-time settlement and clearing infrastructure.

These three points are not a judgment that one infrastructure is superior to another, but an observation of where institutional capital is actually converging. Validation is not reflected in price, but in who placed what where.

The variable for Asian institutions is no longer 'whether to enter,' but the sequence and entry point. Reference cases have been validated, standards have not yet solidified. This period where 'validation is complete but standards are not yet solidified' is precisely the window available for fast followers. How long it will remain open is uncertain.

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