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 experiment to industry typically involves 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 eventually matured into an industry following the bubble's burst with the establishment of regulations and standards. Fintech and artificial intelligence follow a similar path, albeit with different paces and forms.
The crypto industry is currently in a transitional 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 2017 ICO boom and the 2021 DeFi wave, investors rushed in and out repeatedly (overheating phase). The collapse of FTX in 2022 marked both a peak and a turning point. After multiple shakeouts, speculative demand was filtered out, real-world use cases were validated, and US regulators began shifting towards formalization rather than laissez-faire or suppression (regulatory intervention phase).
Because the crypto industry attempts to directly replace core financial functions like settlement, payments, and issuance, it creates greater friction with traditional financial institutions, thus taking longer to be absorbed. Now, the crypto industry has finally reached the intersection of regulatory intervention and industry formation.
Progress on the regulatory front is significant. The US 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. This guidance classifies assets into five categories, discarding the old "security/non-security" binary classification, and formally excludes protocol staking from securities law regulation.
Institutional adoption continues to accelerate. The tokenized Real World Asset (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 size of on-chain assets is approaching $300 billion.
This is not yet enough to be called a mature industry, but industry formation has begun in parallel with regulatory development.
2. Internet Capital Markets: The Endgame for the Crypto Industry
The future the crypto industry points to as it enters the industry phase is a fundamental restructuring of 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 existed. When buying or selling a stock, the asset and funds do not settle at the moment of execution. A clearinghouse sits between the buyer and seller, assuming counterparty risk and requiring both parties to post margin, which is locked until settlement completes. In the US market, the transfer at the depository trust company occurs the next 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 local depositories, potentially stretching settlement times to T+3 or longer. This architecture, designed for an era when trading counterparties did not trust each other, has itself 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 placed into a smart contract simultaneously, and both transfers execute as a single transaction. If either party's conditions are not met, the entire transaction automatically cancels; there is no scenario where only one party's funds exit. Because counterparty risk is eliminated at the code level, the clearinghouse no longer requires margin. Since all participants share the same real-time ledger, inter-institutional reconciliation is unnecessary. Execution and settlement are completed synchronously within seconds.
The entities driving this change are expanding beyond crypto-native startups to include traditional financial institutions. Institutions that once earned revenue from multi-layered intermediary structures are now themselves participating in this transformation. History repeatedly shows that at every inflection point of infrastructure change, institutions that lag behind either pay higher costs or lose their leadership position. 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 passively following through acquisitions and adoption after these platforms became the standard. The fintech transformation followed the same pattern.
This change 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 became dollar-denominated and settled. CHIPS processes over $2.2 trillion in payments each 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 US is replicating this same model within Internet Capital Markets.
3. The Concrete Implementation of Internet Capital Markets
For example, within the landscape of US Internet Capital Markets, Solana is a public blockchain network that integrates technological foundations, institutional practices, and regulatory design.
Solana's technological foundation was forged in the retail market. When DeFi demand caused network overload in 2021, Solana treated it as an opportunity to improve throughput and transaction scheduling. During the meme coin cycle in 2023, it validated its throughput claims by sustaining high-intensity retail traffic over a long period. In October 2025, during a simultaneous market crash and AWS outage, transaction fees on other chains soared to $100 per transaction, while Solana continued operating without interruption at $0.0013 per transaction. The infrastructure stability required for institutional finance was first validated through stress tests in a retail environment.
In 2025, Solana established "Building the 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 functions like freezing, confiscation, whitelist management, and confidential balances directly into the token itself. Issuers can implement compliance requirements within the token without relying on external systems, addressing the financial sector's core needs for asset holding and transaction eligibility at the protocol layer.
On this infrastructure, seven major US financial institutions have launched proofs of concept or completed real transactions on Solana: J.P. Morgan, State Street, Citi, Franklin Templeton, Visa, PayPal, and Western Union. Three of these are among the eight US 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 CEOs of the DeFi Education Fund and 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 advancing business diversification and rulemaking.
4. Institutional Practice: Case Studies Across Four Areas
Institutional participation in the Solana Internet Capital Markets is unfolding across multiple fronts, 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 (Wrapper Layer vs. Native Layer).
4.1 Banking and 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 apparent. These three sub-areas share a key problem: the time lag between trade execution and the actual movement of funds.
According to estimates from Tiger Research, the annual opportunity cost of idle funds due to settlement delays in the US Treasury market alone is approximately $32 billion. Extending this to the entire US fixed-income market, the annual opportunity cost exceeds $45 billion. The speed limitations of the existing financial system impose massive 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 reconciliation processes run separately by each institution vanish. Execution and clearing 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 that accepts stablecoin (PYUSD, USDC) or fiat deposits and invests in short-term US Treasuries to generate yield. It implements the traditional finance concept of a "sweep account" 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 dollars, incurring conversion fees and time delays. SWEEP enables institutions to deposit into and redeem Treasury yield 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 TVL at the time.
J.P. Morgan × Galaxy: Commercial Paper Issuance (USCP). In December 2025, J.P. Morgan arranged a $50 million US commercial paper issuance on the Solana public blockchain. This was not a simulation test but one of the earliest real debt security transactions on a public chain. J.P. Morgan acted as the arranger, creating USCP tokens directly on the Solana blockchain. Coinbase and Franklin Templeton acted as lead investors and buyers, paying with USDC (issued by Circle), with Coinbase providing 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 requires T+1 to T+2 and passes through multiple intermediaries, is compressed to real-time completion.
Citi × PwC: Trade Finance Tokenization (Drafts). Citi and PwC completed an internal proof of concept on Solana, transforming traditional drafts into tokenized digital assets. In a simulated environment, the entire lifecycle of a draft (issuance, financing, circulation, settlement) was automated via smart contracts, reducing settlement time from days to minutes and eliminating manual reconciliation costs. This case study holds strong relevance for Asian financial markets, given that global trade hubs are highly concentrated in Asia.
4.2 Payments and Stablecoins: Redesigning the Settlement Paradigm
Western Union: Global Remittances (USDPT). In May 2026, this 175-year-old company, processing approximately $150 billion in cross-border remittances annually across over 200 countries, issued the US Dollar Payment Token (USDPT) on Solana. In the traditional correspondent banking system, each intermediary bank processes only within its own system and working hours, typically requiring one to two business days for settlement, halting entirely on weekends and holidays. To instantly respond to real-time payment requests from destination countries, Western Union must pre-lock substantial dollar amounts in local bank accounts in each country. 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 supply." When a local agent's cash inventory in a specific country drops below a threshold, the US headquarters treasury team immediately sends funds via USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital, to the 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), planning to expand 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 it will launch the FIUSD white-label stablecoin platform, planned for official launch 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 brands. Banks can offer their own digital dollar to customers without building blockchain infrastructure from scratch. The Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the US) has already announced it will launch the "Roughrider Coin" on this platform. Fiserv's multi-sided network covers approximately 10,000 financial institution clients and 6 million merchants, processing 90 billion transactions annually, and plans to offer FIUSD for free to its member financial institution clients using existing technology.
Asian financial institutions can directly learn from this structure. For South Korea, the white-label model perfectly maps onto the current debate about whether banks or non-bank institutions can issue stablecoins. Once the Financial Services Commission (FSC) sets boundaries and establishes Korean Won-denominated rules, this model becomes readily transferable.
4.3 Tokenization of Real World Assets: Closing the Loop from Issuance to Circulation
Orca × Streamex: Compliant RWA Distribution (GLDY). The tokenized listed stock market has long faced a disconnect between issuance and distribution. While listed stock-like tokenized assets have secondary trading venues on multiple exchanges, non-stock tokenized securities like bonds, commodities, and private loans lack issuer-controlled, permissioned liquidity infrastructure post-issuance. Issuance technology has advanced, but distribution infrastructure has not kept pace.
In May 2026, Orca launched a permissionless AMM infrastructure, allowing issuers to create customizable permissioned pools based on the requirements of their regulated assets. Nasdaq-listed Streamex, as the first issuer, utilized this solution to provide secondary liquidity for its gold yield token, GLDY. The GLDY permissioned pool operates in three stages: all investor wallets are default frozen; only wallets passing Streamex's KYC verification are automatically unfrozen by the on-chain access control layer; unfrozen wallets then execute peer-to-peer real-time trading on the Orca AMM pool without broker or manual approval. Unlike traditional gold investment products restricted by exchange operating hours, GLDY trades 24/7 on Solana, with yield from Monetary Metals' gold lease contracts paid directly to GLDY holders.
This token-level freeze/unfreeze control mechanism is not limited to gold; it can be directly applied to any regulated asset like Treasuries, corporate bonds, and private credit. This is why Orca proposed this structure as the trading infrastructure proposal for the Project Open pilot framework.
Apollo: Private Credit Tokenization (ACRED). Despite high yields, the traditional private loan market has two major structural barriers: high minimum investment amounts restricting access to institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and the illiquidity problem of being locked in until maturity once invested. In January 2025, Apollo, through Securitize, issued the ACRED tokenized tranche fund based on its diversified credit fund (ADCF), with a minimum investment of $50,000. Within the Solana ecosystem, investors convert ACRED into the sACRED wrapper token, deposit it into an institutional
