Solana’s Path to Becoming the Home of Internet Capital Markets

TL;DR

• Solana repositioned around Internet Capital Markets (ICM): one high-throughput chain hosting issuance, trading, collateralization, and settlement of financial assets on-chain.
• Tokenized RWAs on Solana grew about 4x in H1 2026, crossing $3B in June 2026 and reaching an all-time high near $3.7B by July 2026, spanning tokenized equities, US Treasuries, private credit, and tokenized funds.
• Cumulative tokenized-stock volume passed $10B by June 2026, with a single-day record of $644–683M on June 24, 2026, when tokenized equities overtook memecoins as a share of Solana spot volume.
• Solana processed roughly 95% of global on-chain tokenized-stock volume through much of 2025 and H1 2026, including a 95% weekly share during June 15–21, 2026.
• The ICM roadmap is a community-authored blueprint from the Solana Foundation and key players in the industry.
• Key enablers shipped or advanced: DoubleZero mainnet-beta (October 2, 2025), Jito’s Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM), Firedancer client diversity, and Alpenglow consensus (live on a community test cluster since May 11, 2026; mainnet targeted as soon as Q3 2026).
• Institutional depth deepened: BlackRock’s BUIDL cleared about $615M on Solana via Securitize, Citigroup piloted a tokenized settlement with PwC, and market maker B2C2 chose Solana as its primary stablecoin settlement network.
• Risks remain live: validator concentration, tokenized-equity liquidity depth, the legal limits of price-tracking tokens, regulatory dependence on the CLARITY Act, and the fact that Alpenglow and MCL are not yet on mainnet.

From Consumer Network to Internet Capital Markets

Solana’s public positioning moved from consumer network to the settlement layer for Internet Capital Markets. Where the 2025 messaging framed Solana as a chain for everyday users across payments, mobile, tokenized assets, and AI apps, the current thesis reframes that same infrastructure as the plumbing for on-chain finance at institutional scale.

The term Internet Capital Markets was coined by Solana Foundation CMO Akshay BD in a 2025 marketing memo. It received its underwriting framing in Kyle Samani’s January 2025 Multicoin essay, “The Solana Thesis: Internet Capital Markets,” the fifth in Multicoin’s evolving Solana thesis.

Samani argued that once Solana had surpassed Ethereum on on-chain metrics such as trading volume, daily active addresses, and real economic value, the next leg of value would come from hosting financial markets and capturing MEV across the services built on top. Payments were framed as a ‘loss-leader’ that onboards users.

The thesis compounds as assets are issued on-chain, because each new asset becomes collateral that can be borrowed against, traded, and composed into new products.

Asset issuance grows the total addressable market horizontally through more asset types and vertically through more value captured per transaction. Anatoly Yakovenko has framed the endgame as a “decentralized NASDAQ“: a chain with the financial sophistication of traditional markets and the openness of the internet.

How Solana Got Here: From Speculative Cycles to Financial Infrastructure

Solana’s earlier eras proved the chain could handle high-frequency, low-cost activity at scale, which is the capability ICM depends on. Those eras each brought volume, attention, and churn:

• DeFi summer
• NFTs
• Memecoins

The consumer-network phase built the user base, the stablecoin liquidity, and the institutional relationships. That phase included payments via Visa, PayPal, Stripe, Western Union, and Fiserv, the Solana Mobile Stack, and the $16B+ stablecoin base reached by mid-2026.

ICM monetizes that foundation by turning Solana into a venue for issuing and trading real financial assets. Jupiter, which began in October 2021 as a swap-routing tool, now handles the majority of Solana’s aggregator flow and over 50% of total Solana DEX volume.

Stablecoins remain the base layer of Solana’s on-chain liquidity. Solana stablecoin supply reached roughly $14.1B in late 2025 and about $16.4B by May 2026, with USDC the largest component.

The Flagship Use Case: Tokenized Equities and RWAs

Tokenized real-world assets scaled sharply in 2026. Solana’s tokenized RWA value crossed $3B for the first time in June 2026 and reached an all-time high near $3.6–3.7B by July 2026, about a 4x increase over the prior half-year, spanning tokenized equities, US Treasuries, private credit, and tokenized funds.

Tokenized equities drove the headline growth. Cumulative tokenized-stock trading volume on Solana surpassed $10B by June 2026, with H1 2026 alone contributing about $4.9B, a sixfold jump on the prior half.

On June 24, 2026, daily tokenized-equity trading hit a record of roughly $644–683M, surpassing memecoins as a share of Solana spot volume for the first time. Solana dominates the on-chain equity market by share.

Multiple trackers put Solana at roughly 95% of global on-chain tokenized-stock volume across multiple monthly periods in 2025 and H1 2026. That includes a 95% weekly share during June 15–21, 2026, when Solana processed about $1.298B of $1.324B in global weekly tokenized-stock volume.

The Issuers and Venues

The tokenized-equity ecosystem now has established issuer and venue infrastructure across five main players:

• Backed Finance / xStocks: the largest tokenized-equity issuer on Solana, grown to 134+ tokenized stocks, past $3B in cumulative on-chain trading volume, with 57,000+ unique holders by mid-2026.
• Ondo Global Markets: launched 200+ tokenized US stocks and ETFs; by mid-2026 it led one tracker with 406+ tokenized assets worth about $851M.
• Raydium: the primary trading venue for tokenized equities, describing itself on July 1, 2026 as the number-one venue for tokenized asset spot volume on Solana, hosting most xStocks pairs in its concentrated-liquidity pools.
• Backpack Securities: listed tokenized SpaceX shares on SpaceX’s June 12, 2026 Nasdaq listing day via Sunrise, generating about $108M in transaction volume within 24 hours and giving eligible holders the option to transfer to traditional brokerages.
• Solflare: integrated all xStocks assets and added a Google Pay on-ramp, reporting 4M monthly active users.

The SpaceX listing was a defining ICM moment. SpaceX-related tokens generated about $1.19B in June 2026 trading volume, roughly 31% of the month’s total tokenized-stock volume.

Backpack’s SPCX contributed about $1.08B of SpaceX-related token volume in June 2026, and xStocks’ SPCXx added about $852M.

ICM DeFi Composability

The ICM thesis depends on tokenized assets being reused as collateral, extending their utility beyond trading. Jupiter Lend added tokenized SPYx, QQQx, NVDAx, and TSLAx as collateral, letting users borrow against tokenized equities inside DeFi.

RedStone’s Q4 2025 RWA report illustrated that conventional assets that traditionally had thin secondary liquidity become dynamic instruments once tokenized and plugged into DeFi.

The ICM Technical Roadmap

The ICM vision rests on a community-authored roadmap published in July 2025 by Anza. It was co-signed by leaders from Solana Labs, Anza, Jito Labs, DoubleZero, Drift, and Multicoin: Anatoly Yakovenko, Max Resnick, Lucas Bruder, Austin Federa, Chris Heaney, and Kyle Samani.

The roadmap states Solana’s original mission was to build the decentralized backbone for Internet Capital Markets, with raising bandwidth and reducing latency (IBRL) as one requirement and market microstructure as the third pillar it must also address.

DoubleZero: A Dedicated Fiber Backbone

DoubleZero (2Z) is a dedicated fiber network that replaces the public internet for validator communication, reducing latency and jitter and protecting validators from denial-of-service attacks via multicast hardware acceleration. It went live in mainnet-beta on October 2, 2025 with nearly 22% of staked SOL connected at launch, backed by Jump Crypto, Galaxy, RockawayX, and Jito contributing fiber links.

In April 2026, DoubleZero launched DoubleZero Edge, a permissionless platform delivering real-time raw Solana shreds to institutional traders over its dedicated fiber, infrastructure aimed at latency-sensitive market participants.

Alpenglow: Sub-Second Finality

Alpenglow is Solana’s largest consensus overhaul to date, replacing both TowerBFT and Proof of History. It targets finality of roughly 100–150ms, down from about 12.8 seconds, a change of roughly 100x, and removes validator vote transactions from block space to free capacity for user transactions.

Governance approved it under SIMD-0326 (referenced as SIMD-0236 in some reporting) with 98.27% support, and about 52% of staked SOL participated. On May 11, 2026, Anza confirmed Alpenglow was live on a community test cluster, the first live-environment test of the migration validators call the “Alpenswitch.”

Anatoly Yakovenko said at Consensus Miami on May 7, 2026 that mainnet activation could come as soon as Q3 2026 if testing holds, with Q4 as a fallback. Solana’s network-upgrades page has also referenced late-2026 timing tied to the Agave 4.1 client.

For capital markets, sub-second finality lets market makers update quotes faster and reduces their exposure to price moves between quotes. A typical Visa authorization takes 1–3 seconds.

ACE, BAM, and Multiple Concurrent Leaders

The microstructure pillar gives applications control over how their transactions are sequenced, the layer that lets on-chain venues rival Wall Street matching engines. It has four main components:

• ACE (Application-Controlled Execution): a framework letting applications directly control transaction sequencing and execution, solving the limits of Solana’s single-leader model where one validator at a time controls block inclusion and ordering.
• BAM (Jito’s Block Assembly Marketplace): rolled out from late July 2025, it delivers ACE-like capability today via a decentralized, TEE-powered network, letting apps ship custom order-flow logic without forking clients or negotiating with validators.
• MCL (Multiple Concurrent Leaders): a longer-term change targeted through 2027 and beyond, with dozens of geographically distributed leaders proposing transactions at once, making ACE censorship-resistant so information from any geography enters the system within the same execution tick.
• APE (Asynchronous Program Execution): removes the execution-replay step from the transaction-landing path to cut latency, made simpler to implement by Alpenglow’s streamlined consensus.

Firedancer and Client Diversity

Firedancer, the independent validator client built by Jump Crypto in C/C++, added a second production client to a network that historically ran on one codebase. It went live on mainnet in December 2025 after 100+ days of testnet trials.

Adoption remains gradual, with Agave (Rust) and the Jito-Solana fork still the majority. The threshold to watch is 33% of stake weight on Firedancer; below it, Agave retains a superminority and a single-client fault could still halt the chain.

Client diversity carries more weight under ICM, because financial infrastructure cannot tolerate the outages in Solana’s earlier record.

Institutional Adoption

Institutional participation is the demand side of the ICM thesis, and it broadened into 2026 across six named developments:

• BlackRock’s BUIDL fund deployed about $615M on Solana via Securitize, the largest single RWA position on the network.
• Citigroup completed a tokenized Bill of Exchange settlement pilot with PwC in February 2026.
• B2C2, an institutional market maker, chose Solana as its primary stablecoin settlement network.
• SoFi, a nationally chartered US bank with 13M+ customers, enabled native Solana deposits on February 27, 2026, and, with R3, expanded enterprise banking and tokenization initiatives on Solana.
• JPMorgan moved to launch a tokenized money-market fund, part of a broader Wall Street push onto blockchain infrastructure.
• The Solana Foundation launched payments.org on February 26, 2026 as a hub with transaction simulators, developer docs, and production metrics.

Galaxy Research projected Solana’s Internet Capital Markets footprint would reach around $2B by 2026, a figure the RWA total had already surpassed by mid-year.

How Solana Compares With Ethereum for Capital Markets

For hosting on-chain capital markets, the comparison with Ethereum turns on execution speed, liquidity concentration, and settlement finality against decentralization maturity. Solana offers a single high-throughput L1 with sub-second finality targeted, while Ethereum distributes activity across a base layer and multiple L2s.

Dimension	Solana	Ethereum
Architecture	Single high-throughput L1	Base layer plus multiple L2s
Target finality	~100–150ms (Alpenglow, targeted Q3 2026)	Slower base-layer finality; varies by L2
Tokenized-stock share	~95% of on-chain volume (H1 2026)	Minority share of on-chain equities
Total RWA value	~$3.7B (July 2026)	~$12B+ (larger overall base)
Microstructure control	ACE / BAM / MCL roadmap	Less venue-level sequencing control
Client diversity	Growing (Agave, Firedancer)	Mature (multiple clients)
Outage history	Past network halts on record	No comparable full halts

Ethereum still leads the overall tokenization market by total RWA value, with a longer track record of client diversity and decentralization. Solana leads in tokenized equities and in the microstructure tooling aimed at high-frequency, venue-controlled markets.

Read more on institutional network architecture per use cases in our dedicated article: Institution-Centric vs Open Networks.

Counterpoints and Open Risks

A credible case for Solana as the home of Internet Capital Markets names its open risks across five areas:

• Roadmap execution. Alpenglow and MCL are not yet on mainnet. Alpenglow entered community-cluster testing only in May 2026, and MCL is a multi-year effort.
• Liquidity depth. Tokenized-equity volumes are high, but pool depth is thin against traditional markets. A few million dollars in a single pool cannot support large funds without moving price; the picture changes only if the largest pools scale into eight figures with consistent market-maker presence.
• What tokenized shares actually are. Most tokenized equities are price-tracking instruments backed by a share in custody, giving price exposure while legal ownership stays with the custodian. Holders generally get no voting rights, and dividend treatment depends on the issuer’s terms.
• Validator centralization and outages. Stake concentration remains an active critique, and Solana’s history of network halts is why Firedancer, Alpenglow, and DoubleZero carry weight. Adversarial testing of these systems at scale takes years.

Regulatory dependence and jurisdictional limits

• The US-accessible market expands only if legislation such as the CLARITY Act passes, making that expansion conditional on an uncertain outcome.
• Today the leading tokenized equities on Solana are structured for outside the US: xStocks (via Kraken, Bybit, and Backed’s own portal) exclude US, UK, Canadian, and Australian users and reach EU retail under MiCA and Liechtenstein’s TVTG, while US retail access runs through separate issuers like Dinari under a Reg A+ structure.
• The ~95% on-chain share therefore sits mostly outside the world’s largest equity market, and US incumbents are in process of building competing rails.

Where Everstake Fits

Everstake has operated Solana validator infrastructure since testnet, and under ICM that operational layer faces new infrastructure demands. Uptime, correct ordering, and low-latency transaction inclusion are the difference between a market that clears and one that fails.

Everstake built BlockSpace as its Solana MEV infrastructure for the inbound path, the route a transaction travels before a validator includes it in a block, targeting the points where transactions are commonly dropped. BlockSpace operates as a two-sided market, with validators as supply and teams that need their transactions to land as demand.

Each BlockSpace product carries its own access model, billing, and performance profile:

• ShredStream: raw Solana shreds over UDP from 6 regions before slot confirmation.
• Direct Shreds: a dedicated, IP-isolated shred feed at 3ms p50 in-region.
• SWQoS: stake-weighted priority routing with no 15,000 SOL stake requirement.
• Relayer + TPU Adapter: an MEV mempool with direct-to-TPU submission inside the ~250ms per-leader priority window.

BlockSpace tooling maps onto ICM needs directly. For market makers, liquidation bots, and arbitrage strategies, seeing block fragments earlier via ShredStream and landing transactions with priority via SWQoS form the infrastructure edge that on-chain markets require.

As ACE, BAM, DoubleZero, Alpenglow, and MCL compound through 2027 and beyond, Everstake continues running Solana validator infrastructure and BlockSpace, contributing to the reliability and execution layer that Internet Capital Markets depend on.

FAQ

What is the Internet Capital Markets thesis?

Internet Capital Markets (ICM) is Solana’s thesis that one high-throughput chain can host the issuance, trading, collateralization, and settlement of financial assets on-chain.

How large is Solana’s tokenized asset market?

Solana’s tokenized real-world asset value reached an all-time high near $3.7B by July 2026, up about 4x over the prior half-year. On Solana it spans tokenized equities, US Treasuries, private credit, and tokenized funds.

What technical upgrades support Internet Capital Markets?

The ICM roadmap centers on DoubleZero (mainnet-beta live since October 2, 2025), Alpenglow (in community-cluster testing since May 11, 2026, mainnet targeted as soon as Q3 2026), Jito’s BAM and the ACE framework, and Multiple Concurrent Leaders (MCL). These upgrades on Solana target sub-second finality and application-controlled sequencing.

Which institutions are active on Solana’s capital markets?

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund deployed about $615M via Securitize, and Citigroup piloted a tokenized settlement with PwC in February 2026. Market maker B2C2 chose Solana as its primary stablecoin settlement network, and SoFi enabled native Solana deposits on February 27, 2026.

How does Everstake relate to Solana’s ICM push?

Everstake operates Solana validator infrastructure and its BlockSpace tooling, the execution and reliability layer that on-chain markets depend on. Under Internet Capital Markets, that integrity operational layer becomes paramount.

What is Blockspace by Everstake?

Blockspace is Everstake’s Solana MEV infrastructure, sold as a service. It targets the inbound path a transaction travels before a validator includes it, fixing where transactions get dropped.