1. The Crypto Industry is Completing Its 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 period, the overheating period, the regulatory intervention period, and the industry formation period. The internet completed its experimental phase in the 1990s, experienced the overheated dot-com bubble, and eventually developed 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 a transitional zone between the third and fourth stages. After the birth of Bitcoin, a small group of developers verified its potential for payments and settlements (experimental period). During the ICO craze of 2017 and the DeFi wave of 2021, investors repeatedly rushed in and out (overheating period). The collapse of FTX in 2022 was both a peak and a turning point. After multiple rounds of churn, speculative demand has been filtered out, real-world use cases have been validated, and US regulators are beginning to shift towards formalization rather than laissez-faire or suppression (regulatory intervention period).

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 interpretative guidance, recognizing 16 assets, including Solana (SOL), as digital commodities. They 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 market for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) grew by approximately 257% in 15 months, from $5.4 billion at the beginning of 2025 to $19.3 billion by the end of March 2026. If stablecoins are included, the total scale of on-chain assets has approached nearly $300 billion.

This is not yet enough to call it a mature industry, but industry formation has already started in parallel with regulatory construction.

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

The future envisioned for the crypto industry as it enters the industrial phase is a restructuring of the capital market itself. This future can be defined as "Internet Capital Markets" (ICM): a capital market where asset issuance, trading, and settlement all occur on a single public blockchain.

Today's capital markets operate on an architecture designed before the internet was born. When buying and selling a stock, the asset and funds do not settle instantly at the moment of execution. A clearinghouse sits between the buyer and seller, assuming performance risk and requiring both parties to post margin, which is locked until settlement is complete. In the US market, the transfer of ownership at the depository doesn't occur until 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 also involve currency exchange and various national depositories, potentially extending settlement times to T+3 or longer. This architecture, designed for an era of mutual distrust between counterparties, 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 simultaneously into a smart contract, and the two transfers are executed as a single transaction. If the conditions for either party are not met, the entire transaction automatically cancels; there is no scenario where only one party's funds flow out. Since counterparty risk is eliminated at the code level, the clearinghouse no longer needs to demand margin. Because all participants share the same ledger in real-time, inter-institutional reconciliation is unnecessary. Execution and settlement are completed synchronously within seconds.

The entities driving this transformation are expanding from crypto startups to traditional financial institutions. Institutions that once earned revenue from multi-layered intermediary structures are now themselves participating in this shift. History has repeatedly shown that at every inflection point of infrastructure change, institutions that are late to follow either incur higher costs or lose their leading 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 passively following through acquisitions and adoption after these platforms became the standard. The transformation in fintech is similar.

This change is progressing 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 denominated and settled in dollars. CHIPS processes over $2.2 trillion in payments each business day. The SEC's disclosure standards serve as a reference for the capital market systems of other countries. Over 99% of stablecoins are dollar-denominated. The US is replicating this same model within Internet Capital Markets.

3. The Specific Implementation of Internet Capital Markets

For example, within the landscape of US Internet Capital Markets, Solana is a public blockchain network that integrates its technological foundation, institutional practices, and regulatory design.

Solana's technological foundation has been tested in the retail market. During the 2021 DeFi demand surge that caused network overload, Solana treated it as an opportunity to improve throughput and transaction scheduling. In the 2023 meme coin cycle, it validated its throughput claims by sustaining high retail traffic over a long period. In October 2025, during a market crash coinciding 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 by institutional finance was first validated through stress tests in a 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 functions like freezing, seizure, whitelist management, and confidential balances directly into the token code itself. Issuers can achieve compliance requirements within the token without needing external systems, addressing the core financial needs for asset holding and transaction eligibility at the protocol layer.

On this infrastructure, seven major US financial institutions have either 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 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 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 establish regulatory precedents first, while simultaneously advancing business diversification and regulatory development.

4. Institutional Practice: Case Study Analysis Across Four Areas

Institutional participation in the Solana Internet Capital Market 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 depth of value chain integration (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. These three sub-sectors share a key issue: the time lag between trade execution and the actual movement of funds.

According to estimates by Tiger Research, the annual opportunity cost of idle funds due to settlement delays is approximately $32 billion in the US Treasury market alone. 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 significant hidden costs on market participants.

On Internet Capital Market 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 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. It accepts deposits in stablecoins (PYUSD, USDC) or fiat currency and invests in short-term US Treasuries to generate yield. It realizes 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 the existing infrastructure requires first converting stablecoins into dollars, incurring conversion fees and time delays. SWEEP allows institutions to deposit into and redeem from 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 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 genuine debt security transactions on a public blockchain. J.P. Morgan, as the arranger, directly created USCP tokens 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 previously required T+1 to T+2 and multiple intermediaries, was compressed to real-time completion.

Citi × PwC: Trade Finance Tokenization (Bill of Exchange). Citi and PwC completed an internal proof-of-concept on Solana, transforming traditional bills of exchange into tokenized digital assets. In a 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 eliminating manual reconciliation costs. This case has strong relevance for Asian financial markets, as global trade hubs are highly concentrated in the Asian region.

4.2 Payments & Stablecoins: Redesigning the Settlement Paradigm

Western Union: Global Remittance (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 US Dollar Payment Token (USDPT) on Solana. In the traditional correspondent banking system, each intermediary bank processes transactions only within its own system and working hours. Settlement typically takes one to two business days and stops entirely on weekends and holidays. To respond instantly to real-time payment requests from various destination countries, Western Union had to pre-lock significant dollar amounts in local bank accounts across different countries. These pre-funded correspondent account balances remained locked and non-yield-bearing before transfers occurred.

USDPT fundamentally redesigns this settlement process, shifting the paradigm from "pre-positioning funds" to "real-time supply on demand." When the cash inventory of an agent in a specific country falls 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. Regardless of weekends, nights, or holidays, final settlement is achieved rapidly based on Solana's 0.4-second block time. Western Union is also building a Digital Asset Network (DAN), planning 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, planned to go live on Solana in July 2026. Under the white-label structure, Fiserv provides the technology infrastructure and dollar backing system, while individual financial institutions issue and offer stablecoins under their own brands. Banks can offer their own digital dollars to customers without needing to build 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. It plans to offer FIUSD for free to its member financial institution clients using existing technology.

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

4.3 Real-World Asset Tokenization: A Closed 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 multiple exchanges offer secondary trading paths for tokenized assets like listed stocks, non-equity tokenized securities like bonds, commodities, and private loans lack a liquidity infrastructure controlled by the issuer and accessible based on eligibility after 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 according to the requirements of their regulated assets. Streamex, a Nasdaq-listed company, was the first issuer to utilize this solution to provide secondary liquidity for its gold yield token, GLDY. The operation of the GLDY permissioned pool involves three stages: all investor wallets are initially frozen; only wallets that pass Streamex's KYC verification are automatically unfrozen at the on-chain access control layer; unfrozen wallets can then engage in peer-to-peer real-time trading within Orca's AMM pool without broker or manual review intervention. Unlike traditional gold investment products restricted 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. It can be directly applied to any regulated asset, including Treasuries, corporate bonds, and private credit. This is why Orca proposed this structure as the transaction 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 illiquidity as investments are locked in until maturity. In January 2025, Apollo,