万字解析2026年互联网资本市场：美国结构性转变与亚洲机构的战略窗口
1. The Crypto Industry is Completing the Transition from Experiment to Industry
This article is from Tiger Research. The journey of a new technology from experimentation to industry typically goes through four stages: the experimental phase, the overheating phase, the regulatory intervention phase, and the industry formation phase. The internet completed its experimental phase in the 1990s, experienced the overheating of the dot-com bubble, and ultimately evolved into a mature industry after the bubble burst, following the establishment of regulations and standards. Fintech and artificial intelligence are following the same path, albeit with different rhythms and forms.
The crypto industry is currently in the transition zone between the third and fourth stages. After Bitcoin's inception, a small group of developers verified its potential for payments and settlements (experimental phase). During the ICO craze of 2017 and the DeFi wave of 2021, investors rushed in and out repeatedly (overheating phase). The collapse of FTX in 2022 was both a peak and a turning point. After multiple shakeouts, speculative demand was filtered out, real-world use cases were validated, and U.S. regulators began shifting towards formalization rather than laissez-faire or suppression (regulatory intervention phase).
Because the crypto industry seeks to directly replace core financial functions like settlement, payments, and issuance, it creates greater friction with traditional financial institutions, leading to a longer period for adoption. Now, the crypto industry has finally reached the intersection of regulatory intervention and industry formation.
Progress on the regulatory front 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, acknowledging 16 assets, including Solana (SOL), as digital commodities. It categorized assets into five classes, abandoning the old "security/non-security" binary classification, and formally excluded protocol staking from securities law oversight.
Institutional adoption continues to accelerate. The tokenized real-world assets (RWA) market grew approximately 257% in 15 months, from $5.4 billion at the start of 2025 to $19.3 billion by the end of March 2026. Including stablecoins, the total value of on-chain assets is approaching $300 billion.
This is not yet enough to be called a mature industry, but industry formation has already begun in parallel with regulatory construction.
2. Internet Capital Markets: The Final State of the Crypto Industry
The future the crypto industry points to upon entering the industrial phase is a restructuring 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 all occur on a single public blockchain.
Today's capital markets operate on an architecture designed before the internet. When buying a stock, the asset and funds don't settle at the moment of execution. A clearinghouse sits between the buyer and seller, bearing settlement risk and requiring both parties to post margin, which is locked up until settlement is complete. In the U.S. market, transfer at the depository doesn't occur until the business day after execution. Because brokers, exchanges, clearinghouses, and depositories each maintain independent ledgers, they must reconcile with each other daily; any discrepancy delays settlement. Cross-border transactions add currency conversion and foreign depositories, stretching settlement times to T+3 or even longer. This architecture, designed for an era of mutual distrust among trading counterparties, itself has become a cost.
In Internet Capital Markets, code takes over the role of the clearinghouse. The buyer's payment and the seller's asset are simultaneously placed into a smart contract, and the two transfers are executed as a single transaction. If conditions are not met by either party, the entire transaction is automatically canceled; there is no scenario where only one party's funds leave. Because settlement risk is eliminated at the code level, there is no longer a need for a clearinghouse to demand margin. Since all participants share the same ledger in real-time, inter-institutional reconciliation is eliminated. Execution and settlement happen synchronously in seconds.
The entities driving this change are expanding from crypto startups to traditional financial institutions. Those institutions that once earned revenue from multi-layered intermediary structures are now themselves participating in this transformation. History repeatedly demonstrates: at every inflection point of infrastructure change, institutions that lag in following either pay higher costs or lose their leadership positions. The transition 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 taking them over or adopting them passively after they became the standard. The fintech transformation follows the same pattern.
This change is progressing fastest in the United States. After the U.S. dollar became the reserve currency under the 1944 Bretton Woods system, global trade and financial transactions are denominated and settled in dollars. CHIPS processes over $2.2 trillion in payments every business day. The SEC's disclosure standards serve as a reference for capital market systems in other countries. Over 99% of stablecoins are dollar-denominated. The U.S. is replicating this same model within Internet Capital Markets.
3. The Specific Implementation of Internet Capital Markets
As an example, within the landscape of U.S. Internet Capital Markets, Solana is a public blockchain network that integrates its technical foundation, institutional practices, and regulatory design.
Solana's technical foundation has been tempered in the retail market. The 2021 DeFi demand surge caused network overload, which Solana treated as an opportunity to improve throughput and transaction scheduling. During the 2023 meme coin cycle, it validated its throughput claims by sustaining high volumes of 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 operating at $0.0013 per transaction without interruption. The infrastructure stability required for institutional finance was first validated through stress tests in the retail environment.
In 2025, Solana established "Building Internet Capital Markets" as its official strategy, shifting its focus towards institutional payments and asset tokenization. The Token-2022 standard introduced for this purpose embeds functionalities like freezing, confiscation, whitelist management, and confidential balances directly into the token code. Issuers can implement compliance requirements within the token itself without needing external systems, solving the financial sector's core needs for asset holding and transaction eligibility at the protocol layer.
On this infrastructure, seven major U.S. financial institutions have launched proof-of-concepts 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 U.S. Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs).
Concurrently, 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. Instead of waiting for legislation to pass before reacting, it proactively submitted a pilot framework called "Project Open" to the SEC's Crypto Task Force, attempting to set regulatory precedents first, while simultaneously advancing business diversification and regulatory development.
4. Institutional Practice: Case Analysis Across Four Domains
Institutional participation in the Solana Internet Capital Markets is unfolding across multiple lines, but not all participants share the same goals. Understanding this layered activity requires an analytical framework built around two core axes: regulatory posture (Compliance-Driven vs. Frontier-Defining) and value chain integration depth (Wrapping Layer vs. Native Layer).
4.1 Banking & Capital Markets: The Hidden Cost of Settlement Delays
The banking and capital markets sector, encompassing bond issuance, trade finance, and treasury management, is a core revenue source for traditional financial institutions and the area where the cost advantages of Internet Capital Markets are most directly evident. Three sub-domains share a common critical issue: the time lag between trade execution and actual fund movement.
According to Tiger Research estimates, the opportunity cost of idle funds due to settlement delays in the U.S. Treasury market alone amounts to approximately $32 billion annually. Extending this to the entire U.S. fixed-income market, the annual opportunity cost exceeds $45 billion. The speed limitations of the current financial system impose enormous hidden costs on market participants.
On Internet Capital Markets infrastructure, this chronic time lag disappears. Atomic settlement (DvP) bundles asset transfer and payment into a single transaction processed in real-time. The clearinghouse is no longer needed, and the separate reconciliation processes run by each institution vanish. Execution and settlement are completed in 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 that accepts stablecoin (PYUSD, USDC) or fiat deposits and invests in short-term U.S. Treasuries to generate yield. It realizes the concept of a "sweep account" from traditional finance as 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 USD, incurring conversion fees and time delays. SWEEP allows institutions to deposit and redeem Treasury yield assets directly from their wallets. Ondo Finance's flagship fund, OUSG, made an anchor investment of approximately $200 million upon SWEEP's launch, representing about 26% of its TVL at that 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 test but one of the earliest real debt securities transactions on a public blockchain. J.P. Morgan acted as the arranger, creating USCP tokens directly on the Solana blockchain. Coinbase and Franklin Templeton participated as lead 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 (DvP), the corporate financing cycle, which traditionally takes T+1 to T+2 through multiple intermediaries, is compressed to near real-time execution.
Citi × PwC: Trade Finance Tokenization (Drafts). Citi and PwC completed an internal proof-of-concept on Solana, converting traditional drafts into tokenized digital assets. In a simulated environment, the entire lifecycle of the draft (issuance, financing, circulation, settlement) was automated via smart contracts, reducing settlement time from days to minutes and eliminating manual reconciliation costs entirely. This case has strong reference value for Asian financial markets, given that global trade hubs are heavily concentrated in Asia.
4.2 Payments & Stablecoins: Redesigning the Settlement Paradigm
Western Union: Global Remittances (USDPT). In May 2026, this 175-year-old company, which processes approximately $150 billion in cross-border remittances annually across over 200 countries, issued the dollar payment token USDPT on Solana. In the traditional correspondent banking system, each intermediary bank processes only within its own system and working hours; settlement typically takes one to two business days and stops entirely on weekends and holidays. To promptly meet real-time payment requests from various base countries, Western Union had to pre-position large amounts of dollars in local bank accounts across those countries. These pre-funded correspondent account balances remain locked and yield nothing until a transfer occurs.
USDPT fundamentally redesigns this settlement process, shifting the paradigm from "pre-funded reserves" to "real-time, on-demand provision." When the cash inventory of an agent in a specific country drops below a threshold, the U.S. headquarters treasury team instantly sends funds via USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital, to that agent's institutional on-chain wallet. Final settlement is completed rapidly based on Solana's 0.4-second block time, regardless of weekends, nights, or holidays. Western Union is also building a Digital Asset Network (DAN) and plans to roll out its consumer-facing stablecoin payment service, "Stable by Western Union," to over 40 countries within 2026.
Fiserv: White-Label Stablecoin for Financial Institutions (FIUSD). Fiserv announced the launch of its FIUSD white-label stablecoin platform, scheduled to go live on Solana in July 2026. Under the white-label structure, Fiserv provides the technical infrastructure and dollar backing, while individual financial institutions issue and offer stablecoins under their own brand. Banks can thus offer their own digital dollars to customers without building blockchain infrastructure from scratch. The Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the U.S.) has already announced it will issue the "Roughrider Coin" on this platform. Fiserv's multi-sided network serves approximately 10,000 financial institution clients and 6 million merchants, processing 90 billion transactions annually. It plans to leverage its existing technology to offer FIUSD for free to its member financial institution clients.
This structure offers a direct template for Asian financial institutions. For Korea, the white-label model maps precisely onto current debates about whether banks or non-bank entities can issue stablecoins. Once the Financial Services Commission (FSC) sets the boundaries and establishes rules for the Korean won, this model becomes transferable.
4.3 Real-World Asset Tokenization: Closing the Loop from Issuance to Circulation
Orca × Streamex: Compliant RWA Distribution (GLDY). The tokenized public stock market has long faced a disconnect between issuance and distribution. While listed stock-like tokenized assets have multiple exchanges offering secondary trading venues, non-equity tokenized securities such as bonds, commodities, and private loans lack issuer-controlled, permissioned liquidity infrastructure after issuance. Issuance technology advances, but distribution infrastructure hasn't kept pace.
In May 2026, Orca launched a permissionless AMM infrastructure allowing issuers to create customizable permissioned pools based on their regulated asset requirements. Streamex, a Nasdaq-listed company, was the first issuer to utilize this solution, providing secondary liquidity for its gold yield token, GLDY. The GLDY permissioned pool operates in three stages: all investor wallets are initially frozen; only wallets that pass Streamex's KYC verification are automatically unfrozen by the on-chain access control layer; unfrozen wallets then engage in peer-to-peer real-time trading on the Orca AMM pool without needing a broker or reviewer. Unlike traditional gold investment products limited by exchange trading hours, GLDY trades 24/7 on Solana, with yields from Monetary Metals' gold lease contracts paid directly to GLDY holders.
This token-level freeze/unfreeze control mechanism is not limited to gold and can be directly applied to any regulated asset, including Treasuries, corporate bonds, and private credit. This is why Orca proposed this structure as the trading infrastructure component of the Project Open pilot framework.
Apollo: Private Credit Tokenization (ACRED). Despite high yields, the traditional private loan market has two major structural obstacles: high minimum investment amounts limit access to institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and illiquidity, as investments are locked until maturity. In January 2025, Apollo, via Securitize, issued ACRED, a tokenized tranche fund
