Tokenized stocks have crossed the $1 billion market cap marking a major turning point for RWAs on-chain. Public equities drove the surge, with platforms like Ondo Global Markets and xStocks leading the charge, while tokenized private equities on Solana continue to gain early traction and expand rapidly.

 

The rise of tokenized stocks brings several benefits to investors as they enable 24/7 global trading without the traditional T+2 settlement delays, allowing markets to operate continuously rather than shutting down after regular hours. Fractional ownership lowers the barrier for smaller investors to gain exposure to stocks and private investments. Assets can be used directly as collateral in DeFi protocols, creating new opportunities for yield generation and liquidity with instant settlement that reduces counterparty risk and improves capital efficiency. 

 

Ondo Finance and xStocks together account for over 90% of the tokenized stock market cap. Ondo leads at $741.1M (heavily on Ethereum at $440.1M and BNB Chain at $283.2M), followed by xStocks at $315.2M (dominant on Solana with $258.4M and reach through CEXs like Kraken and Bybit). The rest includes Superstate, Robinhood on Arbitrum, Dinari, and PreStocks’ $17.8M in tokenized private equities. Launched in June 2025, xStocks has already facilitated over $3.5 billion in on-chain transaction volume and $25 billion in total trading volume, tokenizing major assets like SPYx, QQQx, NVDAx, and TSLAx. 

 

Another interesting segment is tokenized pre-IPO stocks that bring exposure to private companies like Anthropic directly onto Solana via platforms such as PreStocks. These tokens are created through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that hold shares or exposure acquired on secondary markets. PreStocks then issues 1:1 backed SPL tokens on Solana that track the company's implied valuation which lets holders get price exposure with 24/7 trading on DEXes like Jupiter. The tokenized pre-IPO sector has grown roughly 200% year-to-date, with Anthropic leading the surge. 

However, Ethereum is still the clear leader when it comes to bringing stocks on-chain, as it’s become the primary home for major financial moves as the value of funds moving onto Ethereum has grown 20x since the start of 2024, thanks to massive names like BlackRock and Fidelity launching their own products there. This dominance extends across other major real-world asset categories as well, with the network maintaining a strong position in tokenized commodities, funds, and stablecoins.

 

 

Nasdaq has secured SEC approval to trade tokenized Russell 1000 stocks and major index ETFs on the same order book as their traditional counterparts, while the NYSE is building a 24/7 on-chain venue with instant settlement and stablecoin funding in partnership with Securitize and the DTCC’s tokenization infrastructure. Firms like Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and Apollo are rolling out tokenized money market funds, credit strategies, and other securities across networks that reache beyond Ethereum and Solana to include chains like Polygon, Avalanche, Base, Aptos, and Stellar, reflecting a multi-chain strategy to plug directly into different DeFi ecosystems. 

 

Ondo Global Markets, now one of the main issuers of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, blocks U.S. users and anyone trading from inside the country, and pushes those restrictions through partners like MetaMask, Binance Wallet, and centralized exchanges that list its products. Kraken’s xStocks do the same, limiting access to non U.S. clients in a set list of jurisdictions and explicitly excluding residents of the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Australia. On Solana, the pre-IPO names led by PreStocks let people trade tokens linked to companies like Anthropic, but they sit in a gray zone because they’re SPV based claims with no audited, public proof of backing, wide gaps between implied token prices and private round valuations, thin liquidity, and no clear path for U.S. retail to participate. So while Binance, OKX, Kraken, and others rush to put tokenized stocks in front of millions of users, most of the real volume is still offshore, and U.S. investors are mostly stuck watching from the sidelines until policy catches up.

 

 

AllUnity, a regulated European stablecoin issuer, is bringing EURAU, its Markets in Crypto-Assets compliant stablecoin, to major decentralized exchanges.

 

The announcement, made recently by the issuer, will see the introduction of AllUnity’s EURAU stablecoin in two trading pairs across multiple chains. These include the EURAU/USDT pair on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains via Uniswap and Raydium, as well as the EURAU/USDT0 trading pair on the Tempo blockchain via Uniswap.

 

To support this expansion initiative, Flowdesk, a regulated digital asset trading firm, will serve as the main liquidity provider for the EURAU rollout across the different decentralized exchanges. This move is expected to improve EURAU’s integration and utility in decentralized finance, enabling traders to swap between EURAU and USDT with reduced slippage.

 

According to Rupertus Rothenhäuser, Chief Commercial Officer at AllUnity, the expansion represents a key step toward building a robust and accessible euro liquidity layer. He added that it will enable seamless euro to dollar trading and empower institutions and liquidity providers to participate in deep and efficient markets.

 

Dollar-pegged stablecoins continue to dominate

Stablecoins tied to the U.S. dollar continue to maintain the largest share of the more than $320 billion stablecoin market cap. According to a report, USD pegged stablecoins make up about 99 percent of the total global stablecoin supply, with Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC being the largest by market cap.

 

Euro pegged stablecoins account for a small share of the global supply, with a market cap of about €450 million to approximately $1 billion, representing less than 0.3 percent of the total.

 

Despite remaining a niche segment of the crypto market, euro pegged stablecoins have seen some institutional adoption in recent months. In February this year, Société Générale, one of Europe’s largest banks, expanded its euro pegged EURCV stablecoin to the XRP Ledger and the Stellar blockchain.

 

In December last year, about twelve of Europe’s largest banks, including ING, UniCredit, BNP Paribas, and CaixaBank, formed Qivalis, a joint consortium to launch a euro pegged stablecoin. The consortium has engaged in regulatory dialogue with the Dutch National Bank and has entered advanced talks with cryptocurrency exchanges regarding the launch, which is expected this quarter. 

 

 

Wrapped XRP (wXRP) is now live on Solana, issued by regulated custodian Hex Trust and bridged securely via LayerZero, backed 1:1 of XRP that lets users trade, provide liquidity, lend, and earn yield across Solana’s DeFi apps. 

 

 

This is the latest piece of a multi-chain rollout that Hex Trust detailed back in December 2025, as the same wXRP infrastructure is already operating on Ethereum, Optimism, and HyperEVM, giving XRP holders regulated on-ramps into deeper liquidity pools wherever DeFi happens. RippleX SVP Markus Infanger, noted the move addresses growing demand to use XRP across the wider crypto ecosystem and it aligns with Ripple’s own RLUSD stablecoin work. LayerZero handles the bridging that has captured the majority of reliable cross-chain volume after earlier bridge exploits elsewhere.

 

Major Solana based players such as Ondo Finance which has expanded tokenized treasury and equity products onto the network, and Superstate whose leadership has publicly endorsed Solana as one of only two viable chains for RWAs work alongside Ethereum now operate in a way where they can integrate wXRP straight into liquidity pools lending markets and atomic settlement flows. 

 

At the same time, big institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are building on Solana with their own tokenized market funds. BlackRock brought its BUIDL fund  which holds cash and Treasuries to deliver dollar yields to Solana, giving qualified investors fast, low-cost access to on-chain returns. Franklin Templeton did the same with its on-chain US Government Money Market Fund. WisdomTree brought its tokenized funds covering money markets, stocks, bonds, alternatives, and balanced portfolios, VanEck launched its low-fee Treasury bill fund VBILL, Hamilton Lane added tokenized access to private infrastructure and secondary funds, and Apollo made its ACRED private credit product available as collateral in protocols like Morpho. This lets firms keep their traditional compliance and custody setups intact while plugging these assets straight into Solana, so institutions can easily use wXRP for liquidity, collateral, or quick settlements.

 

Solana has been scaling RWA activity with tokenized ecosystems on-chain surpassing two billion dollars in value and protocols like Kamino handling over one billion dollars in real world asset deposits across isolated lending markets, where institutions borrow against assets and earn yield from cash flows. Ripple has targeted these kinds of entities through its custody solutions and partnerships with banks, including BBVA, DBS Bank, DZ Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and more recently Kyobo Life Insurance, for on-chain settlement and staking capabilities that now extend naturally to Solana networks.

 

There’s support across Phantom wallet, Jupiter Exchange, Meteora, and Titan Exchange, ensures that the infrastructure is ready for immediate use, which removes one of the frictions that has kept payment assets like XRP siloed from builders who prefer Solana for its sub-cent fees and near instant finality.

 

 

Tether has never been shy about playing offense. And in the wake of one of the worst hacks to hit Solana's DeFi ecosystem, the world's largest stablecoin issuer saw an opening, and took it.

 

On April 16, Tether announced a recovery package worth up to $127.5 million for Drift Protocol, the Solana-based perpetual futures exchange that was drained of roughly $285 million on April 1 in a sophisticated hack attributed to North Korean operatives. Combined with $20 million pledged by other partners, the total rescue fund comes to nearly $150 million. But the dollar figure is almost secondary to what Tether actually got in return.

 

The Real Prize: Kicking USDC Off Solana's Biggest Perp DEX

As part of the deal, Drift will swap out Circle's USDC for Tether's USDT as its core settlement asset. That means 128,000 users and more than 35 ecosystem teams, including Gauntlet, Neutral, and M1, all migrate to a USDT-based trading environment. On a network where USDC has historically dominated, this is huge play.

 

On Solana, Circle's USDC carries a market cap of around $8.1 billion, compared to Tether's $3.05 billion. That's a more than 2.6-to-1 advantage for Circle on the chain. In global terms, the picture is reversed: USDT's circulating supply tops $185 billion versus roughly $79 billion for USDC. Tether has always dominated the overall stablecoin market; it just hasn't had much luck on Solana. Until now, maybe.

 

Paolo Ardoino, Tether's CEO, framed the intervention in fairly lofty terms. "Tether's role in the digital assets ecosystem is to provide a platform for individuals and institutions alike that is ready to step forward to help the industry in the moment of darkness," he said in a statement.

 

That said, analysts aren't exactly reading this as pure altruism. As one observer put it, the Drift exploit was, for Tether, an "operational window" to buy market share at a moment of maximum vulnerability. The funding structure itself reinforces this reading: repayments to affected users are tied to future trading activity on the relaunched platform, meaning Tether's money goes further the more Drift succeeds as a USDT venue.

 

Circle Gets the Blame, Tether Gets the Spoils

Tether saw the opening and definitely took it. Circle finds itself under intense scrutiny in the days following the Drift hack, after attackers transferred more than $230 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum using Circle's own cross-chain transfer protocol. Critics, including on-chain investigator ZachXBT, pointed out that Circle had a window of at least six hours to blacklist the relevant wallets and freeze the funds, and did nothing.

 

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire later defended the company's position, saying that USDC wallets are only frozen when directed by law enforcement or courts, not unilaterally during active hacks. The argument tracks with Circle's broader regulatory strategy, which prioritizes institutional alignment and compliance above all else. Whether that's the right call is debatable. What's less debatable is that a class action lawsuit has reportedly been filed against Circle in the aftermath, alleging the firm knowingly allowed attackers linked to North Korea to offload stolen funds through its own infrastructure.

 

Tether, by contrast, has a long history of freezing funds tied to hacks and illicit activity quickly, often without waiting for court orders. That operational difference has real consequences for platforms that care about protecting users when things go wrong.

 

How Drift Gets Back on Its Feet

The April 1 attack was a serious one. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimates losses at approximately $285 million. According to Drift's own postmortem, the attackers used a combination of social engineering and a technical method known as "durable-nonce pre-signing" to obtain privileged administrative access, a scheme that reportedly began at least six months before the exploit was executed. From there, the attackers deposited worthless CVT tokens as fake collateral, then withdrew real USDC, SOL, and ETH.

 

Drift's TVL, which was above $550 million before the attack, has since fallen to around $242 million. The protocol's recovery framework targets $295.7 million in outstanding user losses, a figure that actually exceeds its current TVL. To bridge that gap, the plan leans on future trading fee revenue flowing into a dedicated recovery pool. Users will also receive a separate recovery token representing their claim on that pool, transferable and distinct from the DRIFT governance token.

 

The market responded well to the announcement: DRIFT token surged roughly 22%, climbing from $0.045 to $0.055 on the day, after having fallen as much as 30% in the immediate aftermath of the exploit.

 

A Stablecoin War Fought One Bailout at a Time

The Drift deal lands at a time when competition in the stablecoin market is genuinely heating up. USDC has made real headway in institutional and DeFi use cases over the past couple of years, partly by positioning itself as the "clean" option for regulated environments. Circle's IPO plans have only reinforced that narrative.

 

Tether still holds a commanding global lead, but the gap in on-chain activity has been narrowing. Coindesk data shows USDC transaction volumes outpaced USDT's in recent months, and Circle's market share has been expanding. This makes Solana, where USDC has been strongest, a particularly important front in what is increasingly looking like a full-scale stablecoin war.

 

Whether the Drift bailout actually converts into lasting USDT dominance on Solana remains to be seen. Relaunch is contingent on Drift completing two independent security audits, and rebuilding trust with users after a $285 million heist takes more than a well-funded recovery plan. But Tether, at least for now, holds a key piece of Solana's DeFi architecture. And it didn't exactly have to do much begging to get it.

 

The Solana Foundation, in collaboration with blockchain security firm Asymetric Research, has launched new security initiatives aimed at strengthening the security of the Solana network.

 

In a blog post on Monday, the foundation announced the launch of new security initiatives designed to provide an extra layer of protection for protocols built on the network. Among these initiatives are STRIDE, a security framework, and SIRN, a network of security firms focused on protecting the Solana ecosystem.

 

 

The STRIDE Framework 

STRIDE, which stands for Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises, is a structured security framework and program launched by the Solana Foundation. It is aimed at evaluating, monitoring, and escalating security across all projects built on the Solana network.

 

The STRIDE framework is built on eight key pillars: program security, governance and access control, oracle and dependency risk, infrastructure security, supply chain security, operational security, monitoring and incident response, and log management and forensics.

 

These pillars will be used by the foundation’s partner, Asymmetric Research, to evaluate the security strength of all protocols on the Solana blockchain. Protocols with a total value locked of more than $10 million that pass the STRIDE evaluation will receive continuous operational security and active threat monitoring, funded by Solana Foundation grants. The higher the evaluation result, the greater the level of protection and funding they will receive.

 

Protocols with a total value locked of more than $100 million that pass the STRIDE evaluation will also receive, in addition to grants, formal fund verification. The foundation describes this as a mathematical, proof based method that exhaustively guarantees the correctness of smart contracts.

 

The findings of the STRIDE framework will be published publicly. According to the foundation, this is intended to give users and investors insight into the protocols they use and rely on.

 

SIRN: A Network of Security Firms

Among the initiatives launched by the Solana Foundation is SIRN, short for Solana Incident Response Network, a network of security firms that will respond and act in the event of a security incident.

 

Although SIRN will be available to all blockchain protocols on the Solana network, priority will be given to protocols with higher total value locked, similar to the additional benefits that protocols with higher total value locked will receive under the STRIDE program.

 

Interested in knowing who makes up SIRN?

 

The Solana Incident Response Network comprises Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow, a combination of cybersecurity firms that includes Web3 and traditional security firms as well as a smart contract auditing firm.

 

Increase in DeFi attacks

The programming initiatives launched by the Solana Foundation are in response to the over $280 million attack on Drift Protocol, the largest decentralized perpetual exchange on the Solana blockchain. The attack is, so far, the most devastating DeFi attack this year and the second largest in the history of the Solana blockchain, following the 2022 Wormhole attack, which resulted in losses exceeding $325 million.

 

Step Finance, a DeFi aggregator built on Solana, was also affected by a DeFi hack earlier this year, which led to losses of about $40 million. According to DeFiLlama, over $168 million was stolen across 34 blockchain protocols in the first quarter of this year, prior to the Drift incident.

 

 

Whatever optimism had crept back into crypto markets over the past two days got wiped out Thursday morning after President Trump's primetime address to the nation offered not a path to peace, but a harder line. Crypto fell. Stocks fell. Oil surged past $106. The familiar cycle repeated itself, for roughly the fifth or sixth time in five weeks.

 

Bitcoin dropped 3% to around $66,000, giving back the gains it had quietly built on Tuesday. Ethereum fell by a similar margin, sliding to $2,056. BNB shed 4.9% to $580, XRP lost 3.5% to $1.30, and Solana's SOL had the worst session of the major tokens, off 5.2% and now down roughly 13% on the week. It was an ugly morning across the board, and it felt awfully familiar.

 

A Rally Built on Hope, Not Reality

Tuesday had been, briefly, a good day. Trump had made offhand comments suggesting the Iran conflict could wrap up within weeks and that a formal deal was not necessarily a prerequisite for a resolution. That was enough. Asian equities surged 4%. S&P 500 futures climbed. Bitcoin pushed back toward $69,000. The crypto Fear and Greed Index, which had been pinned at single digits for weeks, got a bit of air.

 

Then came the Wednesday speech. In nearly 20 minutes, Trump outlined no real shift in Iran policy, offered no pathway to a ceasefire, and gave no timeline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping lane that has been effectively closed since mid-March. He said the strait would reopen 'naturally' once hostilities subside. That was not what markets had priced in and our small rally just went away.

 

The Real Problem Underneath the Headlines

Analysts and traders increasingly point out that tracking Trump's daily commentary on Iran may be beside the point. The underlying oil market situation has been quietly deteriorating, independent of whatever the president says on any given afternoon. The International Energy Agency's member nations authorized the largest coordinated strategic petroleum reserve release in the organization's 50-year history, around 426 million barrels in total, to compensate for the near-shutdown of Hormuz flows. Those flows represent about 20% of the world's seaborne oil trade.

 

The problem is that those emergency reserves are expected to run dry within weeks. When that happens, the manageable shortfall of roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels per day could balloon to 10 or 11 million, which would be an entirely different kind of crisis. Ship insurance premiums for Hormuz transits remain elevated. Tanker traffic through the strait has not recovered. The real-world picture, independent of political statements, is not improving.

 

Going Nowhere Fast

Bitcoin has essentially traded between $60,000 and $73,000 for the entirety of the conflict, now entering its sixth week. It sells off on escalation headlines, bounces on de-escalation headlines, and ends up more or less where it started. The Fear and Greed Index has been stuck between 8 and 14 for a month, deep in extreme fear territory. The pattern has become almost mechanical at this point.

 

There are some who see reasons for cautious optimism, and they are not entirely without basis. April has historically been one of Bitcoin's stronger months, finishing green in 10 out of 15 years with an average gain of around 20.9%. Bitcoin also bounced clearly off two-month uptrend support near $60,000 last week and is attempting to reclaim its 50-day moving average. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen roughly $2.5 billion in net inflows over the past month, a sign that institutional interest has not collapsed. BlackRock noted this week that large investors are concentrating specifically in Bitcoin and Ether rather than spreading into the broader altcoin market.

 

But seasonality does not trade against a war. Until the conflict itself shows signs of genuinely unwinding, the pattern of hope, headline, reversal is unlikely to change. Wednesday was just another reminder of that.

 

The next few weeks will likely be decisive, not because of anything Trump says, but because of what happens with oil supply fundamentals that have been quietly building toward a breaking point regardless of the diplomatic noise.

 

Bitcoin surged to $71,200 on Monday as investors are optimisitc on de-escalation of the Iran conflict.

 

The move started when President Trump posted on Truth Social that he had instructed the Department of War to postpone planned strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days, following what he called "very good and productive" talks with Tehran. Crypto jumped roughly 5% on the news. Ether climbed above $2,100, BNB pushed through $650, and XRP traded above $1.40. Oil plunged around 11%, S&P 500 futures gained nearly 4%, and global markets added an estimated $2.5 trillion in value within about 20 minutes.

 

Then Iran's state-affiliated Fars News Agency cited an unidentified source denying any talks had taken place. Gains started reversing almost immediately. Bitcoin is now up about 2.5% on the day and down roughly 5% on the week, sitting just under $71,000 after hitting an intraday high of $71,224 per CoinGecko data.

 

The session is the latest chapter in a conflict that has rattled crypto markets since Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, when the U.S. and Israel struck targets across Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran's subsequent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global oil flows, has kept energy prices elevated and risk appetite suppressed. The Federal Reserve, meeting earlier this month against that backdrop, revised its 2026 inflation forecast upward to 2.7% and signaled a higher-for-longer stance on rates.

 

Despite the chaos, Bitcoin has held above its pre-war price level, a fact that has not gone unnoticed. When the strikes began on a Saturday morning and every traditional market was closed, crypto was the only liquid venue available for investors to respond. That 24/7 trading reality, once seen as a volatility risk, has started looking more like a feature.

 

The five-day pause, if it holds at all, does not end the conflict. Iran continues to strike targets across the Gulf, and Israel would need to sign on to any broader ceasefire. Israel has publicly said it has thousands of remaining targets and requires at least three more weeks of operations. Prediction markets currently favor a ceasefire by late April at the earliest.

 

Bitcoin's 30-day implied volatility index has bounced to 60%, and $791 million in total leveraged positions have been wiped across crypto markets this session according to CoinGlass, with $425 million of those being longs. The clock on Trump's five-day window is ticking, and so is the market's patience.

Six years in, Solana still can't quite shake the casino label. And honestly, it probably never will, at least not completely. The chain that gave the world the $TRUMP memecoin, the $LIBRA debacle, and a near-endless stream of cartoon animal tokens processed somewhere close to 30% of its average monthly DEX volume in 2025 through memecoin activity alone, according to Blockworks data. But now, with over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks already live on-chain through Ondo Finance, and Visa, PayPal, and WisdomTree all building on the network, Solana's identity crisis may be ending, not by ditching memecoins, but by absorbing institutional finance alongside them.

In January 2026, Ondo Finance pushed more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs onto Solana. Not synthetic proxies, not wrapped derivatives, but actual securities, backed 1:1 by shares held with U.S.-registered broker-dealers, accessible on-chain 24 hours a day, five days a week for minting and redemption, and transferable around the clock

 

A month later, WisdomTree followed with its full suite of regulated tokenized funds. Visa confirmed U.S. banks were settling transactions with it over Solana in USDC. Worldpay said it would let merchants settle in USDG on the same network. PayPal positioned PYUSD on Solana for faster, cheaper commerce flows.

 

The memecoin chain is becoming something else. Or rather...and this is the more accurate framing, it's becoming something more.

 

 

A Sixth Birthday, a Changed Ecosystem
Solana launched in March 2020, built on a proof-of-history consensus mechanism that promised transaction throughput orders of magnitude faster than Ethereum at the time. Its early years were defined by the NFT boom, DeFi summer spillover, and a catastrophic near-death experience when the FTX collapse in late 2022 wiped out a major backer and sent SOL's price into the floor.

The recovery was messy and improbable, fueled partly by a genuine developer community and partly by retail investors who found Solana's low fees and fast finality well-suited to trading junk tokens at high velocity.

 

By 2024 and into 2025, the memecoin supercycle reached its apex on Solana. The pump.fun launchpad became the chain's most-used application by fee revenue for stretches of time. Hundreds of tokens named after pets, politicians, and pop culture references launched and died there every week.

So when institutions started showing up with serious capital and serious products, the natural question was: why here?

 

 

Ondo's Gamble
Ondo Finance's expansion to Solana appears to be a structural argument about where capital markets are going.

The company, which became the largest real-world asset issuer on Solana by asset count with the January launch, brought its Global Markets platform to the network after testing it on Ethereum and BNB Chain. The catalog covers technology and growth stocks, blue-chip equities, broad-market and sector ETFs, and commodity-linked products. 

Under Ondo's structure, token holders get economic exposure to publicly traded securities, including dividends, but do not hold direct shareholder rights in the underlying companies. The actual stocks and any cash in transit sit with U.S.-registered broker-dealers. The blockchain handles the movement layer: how tokens transfer, how positions clear, how compliance rules travel with the asset rather than being enforced at the application level.

The execution numbers that preceded the launch are worth noting. Before going live, Ondo ran tests showing $500,000 in tokenized Google shares trading on-chain with just 0.03% slippage and pricing that matched traditional exchange-traded equivalents. Total transaction costs for large trades came in under $102, a figure that compares favorably to conventional brokerage costs at similar volumes.

Ian De Bode, president of Ondo Finance, put it directly when the Solana expansion went live: liquidity depth and asset selection from existing versions of tokenized stocks had remained limited, and Ondo's model was designed to address that gap by bringing liquidity inherited from traditional exchange venues into an on-chain catalog.

Tokenized equities existed before Ondo's Solana launch, but they were thinly traded, narrowly available, and difficult to discover for the average crypto-native user. Ondo's integration with Jupiter, Solana's primary DEX aggregator, changed the distribution equation. Suddenly, the same wallets and interfaces people were using to buy memecoins could also pull up tokenized Apple or tokenized SPY.

 

 

The Institutional Path Becomes Clearer
WisdomTree's move a week after Ondo's launch was in some ways even more revealing about how institutional finance is thinking about Solana.

The New York-based asset manager extended its full suite of regulated tokenized funds to Solana through its WisdomTree Connect institutional platform and its WisdomTree Prime retail app.

 

That means money market, equity, fixed-income, alternatives, and asset allocation products are now natively mintable on the network.

Maredith Hannon, WisdomTree's head of business development for digital assets, framed the move as a direct response to Solana's technical characteristics: high transaction speeds and the ability to meet growing crypto-native demand while maintaining the regulatory standards institutions expect. Nick Ducoff of the Solana Foundation noted that RWAs on the network had already surpassed $1 billion before WisdomTree's arrival, and that the asset manager's expansion reflected both demand for tokenized RWAs and Solana's demonstrated ability to support that demand at scale.

What WisdomTree's entry signals, beyond the product itself, is that the 'sterile environment' theory of institutional adoption was wrong. Traditional finance did not wait for Solana to become culturally palatable before moving in. The infrastructure made sense regardless of what else was happening on the network, and the institutional clients accessing these funds through WisdomTree Connect are unlikely to lose sleep over what else is trading at the same time in the same ecosystem.

 

 

Payments, Stablecoins, and the Scale Argument
The tokenized securities story makes more sense when you look at what the payments data was already showing heading into early 2026.

In February 2026, Solana processed more than $650 billion in stablecoin transactions, more than double its previous monthly record, according to figures cited in the network's payments report. Stablecoin supply on Solana exceeded $15 billion. These are the type of money-like flows at a scale that makes the 'financial rail' framing not just plausible but arguably already accurate.

Visa is settling with U.S. banks in USDC over Solana. Worldpay is building merchant settlement in USDG on the same network. PayPal has positioned PYUSD on Solana specifically for commerce use cases, much faster and cheaper than alternative rails. Citi and PwC have been exploring the tokenization of bills of exchange for trade finance using Solana infrastructure.

None of these companies needed Solana's memecoin reputation to disappear before they could act. They needed speed, cost efficiency, and liquidity, things the network already provides at scale.

 

 

The Numbers Behind the Narrative
A few data points help ground what's actually happening against the broader tokenization landscape.

Ethereum still leads the on-chain RWA market by a significant margin, holding around $15.6 billion in tokenized asset value excluding stablecoins, according to RWA.xyz data. Solana sat at roughly $1.84 billion, with BNB Chain between the two at approximately $2.95 billion.

But the relevant number may not be total asset value so much as distribution. RWA.xyz shows about 91.6% of Solana's tokenized asset value, approximately $1.68 billion of the $1.84 billion, in distributed, portable on-chain form. Monthly RWA transfer volume on the network exceeded $2 billion. For context, the entire tokenized stocks category across all chains carries a market cap of around $1.08 billion, with monthly transfer volume of roughly $2.3 billion. Ondo alone holds about $644 million of that, representing roughly 60% platform market share.

Those figures suggest the assets that are on Solana are actually moving and not sitting idle in wallets. This is a huge distintion when evaluating whether tokenization on the network is functional infrastructure or performative positioning.

Part of what makes the institutional push on Solana legible is that the regulatory environment shifted in a meaningful way in early 2026.

On March 5, the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and OCC jointly stated that eligible tokenized securities should receive the same capital treatment as non-tokenized equivalents. For years, one of the institutional barriers to holding tokenized assets was the regulatory uncertainty around capital requirements. Banks considering tokenized securities as part of their balance sheet couldn't get a clear read on whether doing so would attract punitive capital charges relative to holding the conventional version of the same instrument.

The SEC's decision to grant special relief allowing intraday trading in tokenized shares of WisdomTree's money market fund points in the same direction. 

 

 

The $2 Trillion Horizon
The projections for tokenized assets are substantial, and they come from sources that aren't in the habit of WAGMI, moon-shot hype.

McKinsey's base case puts tokenized asset value at roughly $2 trillion by 2030, with a range running from $1 trillion to $4 trillion depending on adoption pace. BCG has estimated that tokenized fund AUM alone could exceed $600 billion by the same date. Citi's stablecoin outlook, published in early 2025, projected $1.9 trillion in base-case stablecoin issuance by 2030 and a bull case of $4 trillion, with potential transaction activity hitting between $100 trillion and $200 trillion.

These projections share a common assumption: blockchains transition from being primarily an asset class (something to invest in) to being market infrastructure (something to run finance through). If that transition happens at anything like the projected scale, the networks with the most liquid, most accessible, and most developer-friendly infrastructure stand to capture a disproportionate share of the flow.

Solana's combination of throughput, low fees, and a large existing retail user base that's already comfortable navigating on-chain interfaces makes it a serious contender for that infrastructure role. The 3.2 million daily active users that Solana was citing around the time of the Ondo launch aren't a demographic institutions typically associate with capital markets access. And that may be the whole point.

 

 

What This Means for Solana
On one end, you have high-velocity, high-risk memecoin trading, the casino slot machine that gave the network its reputation. On the other end, you have regulated, compliance-embedded tokenized securities and institutional payment rails. And it seem that the two ends don't appear to be in direct conflict with each other. They use the same settlement layer, pay the same validators, and contribute to the same liquidity depth.

Whether that coexistence holds as institutional volume grows is an open question. There are scenarios where the reputational bleed from high-profile memecoin controversies creates friction for institutional deployment. There are also scenarios where the retail liquidity generated by the casino side of the network ends up being exactly the kind of distribution depth that makes tokenized equities viable in a way they haven't been elsewhere.

For now, the market appears to be betting on the latter. The capital allocation decisions of Ondo, WisdomTree, Visa, Worldpay, PayPal, and Citi, all happening in just a span of a couple months, represent a pretty explicit vote of confidence in the coexistence model.

Solana turned six this month. It's survived an exchange collapse that should have killed it, rebuilt a developer ecosystem that most people wrote off, and navigated a memecoin supercycle that burnished and tarnished its reputation in roughly equal measure.

The tokenized stocks development isn't a pivot or rebrand...it's more of an expansion. The network didn't stop being what it was to become something new, it added a whole other layer on top of an already messy, active, genuinely liquid base. That's not the way institutional infrastructure is supposed to develop, according to the conventional playbook.

But the conventional playbook was written before $650 billion in monthly stablecoin volume was possible on a chain that also hosts a token called $BONK. 

 

Crypto exchange Kraken has launched xChange, a new on-chain trading engine designed to facilitate trading of its tokenized stocks, xStocks, across Ethereum and Solana.

 

According to Kraken, xChange supports on-chain trading of more than 70 tokenized equities with 1:1 price backing to their underlying shares. To ensure transparency, the platform allows these tokenized equities to track their prices in the public stock market.

 

As a result, tokenized equities on the xChange platform will track their corresponding prices in the public stock market without the involvement of third-party intermediaries.

 

How xChange Is Transforming the Tokenized Equity Market

The tokenized equity market has grown remarkably. According to a January report from DL Research, it expanded approximately 2,800% year over year, rising from about $32 million in January 2024 to $963 million in January 2025.

 

In fact, Token Terminal reported that the tokenized stock and equity market reached an all-time high valuation of $1.2 billion in December 2025.

 

 

 

As tokenized equities continue to gain traction, with monthly trading volumes reaching $800 million, Kraken launched xChange to build on this momentum.

By providing a unified execution layer that connects liquidity across Ethereum and Solana, xChange enables users to execute large trades quickly with minimal slippage.

 

xChange offers atomic on-chain settlement, allowing users to execute trades indivisibly. There are no intermediate states during a trade; orders are either executed in full at the quoted price or not executed at all.

 

xChange also operates 24 hours a day, five days a week across the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. The benefit? Traders can continue trading tokenized equities beyond traditional market hours.

 

 

What xStocks Are

Launched in June 2025, xStocks are tokenized representations of real U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Although they were launched by Kraken, they are issued by Backed Finance.

 

Although they are not available to users in the United States and the United Kingdom, they are available in more than 140 countries, and their performance so far has been impressive.

 

 

 

Since launch, they have recorded $3.5 billion in on-chain transaction volume and $25 billion in total trading volume across exchanges, with approximately $225 million in tokenized assets held across 80,000 blockchain wallets.

 

 

Solana-based non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, Magic Eden, is winding down its Ethereum and Bitcoin NFT operations to focus on its online casino platform, Dicey.

 

According to an X post made by its CEO and co-founder, Jack Lu, support for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Bitcoin-based Runes and Ordinal marketplaces will end on March 9. It will also be winding down support for its Bitcoin API by March 7 and its crypto wallet by April 1.

 

 

But, why this move?

 

Despite Magic Eden having several products that are very popular, these products have contributed very little to Magic Eden's overall revenue. Hence, the reason for its refocusing. According to Jack, there is a massive opportunity in iGaming. 

 

 

What is Dicey? 

Dicey is a crypto-powered online casino and gambling platform that allows users to bet using cryptocurrency. Since it is built on the Solana blockchain, transactions and outcomes are transparent and verifiable on-chain.

 

To ensure no user is left out, the team is focusing not only on casino-style games but also on adding a "sportsbook," a feature common in established gambling platforms like Stake, which allows users to bet on sports and other non-casino-style games.

 

Although the platform is still undergoing a closed beta test, the results have been incredible. Within a span of two months, approximately 200 users have placed bets totaling over $15 million, prompting the team to focus more on it, given its potential for success.

 

 

Are NFTs Losing it? 

The NFT market has gone through a series of rough patches, with its hype and trading volume steadily declining over the last few years.

 

To illustrate, in 2021, the global NFT trading volume hit $24-25 billion. That year saw several NFT collections receive massive hype, with many high-profile collections like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club being launched.

 

However, this hype and boom has steadily declined over the years, with the annual NFT trading volume falling to roughly $5-6 billion, a 76-79% drop from its 2021 peak.

 

Due to this significant decline, many NFT companies have had to shut down. 

 

Early this year, Nifty Gateway, one of the earliest and major NFT marketplaces, announced its plans to shut down. The reason? The NFT market downturn. In 2022, X2Y2, one of the most notable NFT trading platforms, also shut down, citing a ~90% drop in user activity.

 

While some NFT companies have had to shut down and pack up, others have taken steps similar to Magic Eden, re-strategizing. For example, in late 2025, OpenSea re-strategized, shifting from being a traditional NFT marketplace to focusing on broader crypto trading.

 

 

Solayer is making a very deliberate move into the next phase of its life.

 

The Solana-native project has launched the alpha version of its InfiniSVM mainnet and announced a $35 million ecosystem fund to bring builders, capital, and activity onto the network. Taken together, the message is clear. Solayer is no longer just experimenting on the edges of Solana, it is aiming to become a serious piece of high performance financial infrastructure.

 

For a project that started out focused on restaking, this is a notable pivot. And so far, it looks like a well-timed one.

 

From Restaking Experiment to Infrastructure Play

Solayer first entered the picture as a restaking protocol on Solana, offering users a way to put staked SOL to work securing additional services. The idea resonated quickly, especially in a market hungry for capital efficiency.

 

But behind the scenes, the team was already thinking bigger. Restaking was only the starting point. Over time, Solayer began layering in financial products, payments tooling, and quality-of-service concepts tied directly to stake. Each addition pointed in the same direction: building infrastructure, not just yield strategies.

 

InfiniSVM is the clearest expression of that shift.

 

Why InfiniSVM Matters

At a high level, InfiniSVM is Solayer’s take on pushing the Solana Virtual Machine beyond what typical software-only blockchain setups can handle. Instead of relying entirely on standard execution environments, Solayer leans heavily into hardware acceleration and high-speed networking.

 

The goal is not just higher throughput, although the numbers being discussed are eye-catching. The real focus is latency. Solayer wants transactions to feel immediate, finality to be near-instant, and on-chain systems to behave more like traditional financial infrastructure.

 

That matters if you believe the next wave of crypto adoption comes from things like real-time trading, payments, and institutional workflows. These are areas where delays are costly and reliability is non-negotiable.

 

Just as important, InfiniSVM stays fully compatible with the Solana Virtual Machine. Developers building for Solana do not need to rethink their stack to deploy on Solayer, which lowers friction and keeps Solayer tightly connected to Solana’s liquidity and tooling.

 

Mainnet Alpha, Now Live

The InfiniSVM mainnet alpha is live, giving developers a chance to test what this architecture can actually do in production. While alpha networks are, by definition, still evolving, Solayer is already supporting live applications and cross-network connectivity designed to move assets quickly across SVM environments.

 

The team has been careful not to oversell this stage. The alpha is a foundation, not a finish line. Performance tuning, validator expansion, and decentralization will all come over time. Still, getting a live network into the hands of builders is an important milestone, and one many projects never quite reach.

 

Backing the Ecosystem With $35 Million

Alongside the mainnet launch, Solayer introduced a $35 million ecosystem fund aimed squarely at builders. The fund is designed to support teams working across DeFi, payments, real-world assets, and emerging financial applications that need speed and scale.

 

What stands out is the hands-on approach. Solayer is pairing capital with engineering support and accelerator-style programs, signaling that it wants serious builders who plan to push the limits of the network, not just deploy quick forks.

 

The timing feels intentional. With the network live, the next challenge is usage. The fund is meant to shorten the gap between infrastructure and real economic activity.

 

A Crowded, But Promising Landscape

Solayer is entering a space that is getting more competitive by the month. Several teams are exploring new ways to extend the Solana Virtual Machine through app chains, execution layers, and modular designs.

 

Solayer’s angle is clear. It is betting on extreme performance and financial use cases first. That focus sets it apart and plays to Solana’s broader reputation for speed, while pushing the ceiling higher than most existing networks.

 

If real-time on-chain finance becomes a meaningful category, Solayer looks well positioned to benefit.

 

The Road Ahead

There is still plenty of work ahead. Solayer will need to prove that its performance claims hold up under sustained load, that developers stay engaged, and that decentralization keeps pace with growth.

 

But with a live mainnet, meaningful funding behind the ecosystem, and a clear technical vision, Solayer is starting this next chapter from a position of strength.

 

In a market crowded with half-built infrastructure and big promises, Solayer is doing something refreshingly straightforward. It shipped a network, backed it with capital, and invited builders to see what happens next.

Eric Adams NYC Token Crash Fuels Rugging Claims 

 

 

For a brief window, Eric Adams’ “NYC Token” looked like it might be the next Solana rocket. The price ripped higher almost immediately after launch, pushing the token to a paper valuation north of half a billion dollars.

Then it collapsed. Fast.

Within roughly 30 minutes of peaking, the token had lost more than 80 percent of its value. What looked like a breakout turned into a straight-down chart, and by the time most traders realized what was happening, liquidity was already disappearing.

This was not just volatility. The on-chain data tells a much messier story.

 

The Numbers Behind the Crash

At its peak, NYC Token briefly reached an estimated market capitalization of around $540 million. That number didn’t last long. As selling pressure hit, the price unraveled almost immediately, wiping out roughly $500 million in value in under an hour.

The speed matters. This was not a slow bleed or a multi-day unwind. It was a vertical move up followed by an even faster move down.

And the data shows why.

 

The Liquidity Move That Changed Everything

According to on-chain analysis highlighted in the original report, a wallet linked to the token’s deployer pulled roughly $2.5 million worth of USDC liquidity from the main trading pool right around the price peak.

That single action dramatically reduced the pool’s depth.

When liquidity is pulled like that, every sell becomes more painful. Slippage increases, prices gap lower, and panic compounds itself. That’s exactly what happened next.

Later, about $1.5 million in USDC was added back into the pool. But that still leaves roughly $900,000 that was never returned, at least not publicly accounted for.

To traders watching in real time, that sequence looked brutal. Liquidity out near the top, partial liquidity back after the damage was done, and silence on where the rest went.

 

 

 

 

 

The Supply Was Never Really Free

Then there’s the ownership data.

This was not a broadly distributed token. The top five wallets controlled roughly 92 percent of the total supply. The top ten held close to 99 percent. One wallet alone reportedly held about 70 percent.

Put simply, almost no one outside a very small group actually controlled meaningful supply.

That means price discovery was never organic. It also means that liquidity removal hit a market that was already artificially thin. Retail traders weren’t trading against thousands of independent holders. They were trading inside a structure dominated by a handful of wallets.

Once those wallets moved, the market had no choice but to follow.

 

Retail Traders Paid the Price

The data includes some ugly examples.

One wallet tracked on Solana bought the token five separate times, spending a total of about $745,000. Less than 20 minutes later, that same wallet sold everything for roughly $272,000.

That’s a loss of nearly $475,000 in minutes.

That pattern wasn’t unique. Many late buyers entered during the final leg of the pump, assuming liquidity would hold and momentum would continue. Instead, they became exit liquidity as soon as the pool thinned out.

This is how these collapses always look after the fact. Clean on-chain evidence, messy human behavior.

 

The Narrative Problem

Eric Adams positioned NYC Token as something more than a meme. The messaging leaned heavily on civic themes, education, and fighting antisemitism. It sounded closer to a mission than a gamble.

But the mechanics told a different story.

No clear public breakdown of wallet ownership. No transparent explanation of liquidity controls before launch. No smart-contract enforced locks that traders could independently verify in real time.

When the crash happened, explanations focused on market dynamics and demand rather than addressing the core issue. Liquidity was moved. Concentration was extreme. Retail traders were exposed.

In crypto, narratives don’t survive contact with block explorers.

 

Was It Rugged?

That depends on definitions, but the structure is hard to defend.

A token that crashes more than 80 percent within 30 minutes, after millions in liquidity are removed by a deployer-linked wallet, while one address holds the majority of supply, is going to be viewed as a rug pool by the market. Fair or not, that perception sticks.

You don’t need a hidden backdoor or malicious code. Control alone is enough.

 

The Bigger Takeaway

NYC Token will probably be forgotten in a few weeks. The losses won’t be.

This episode is another reminder that in crypto, structure matters more than slogans. Liquidity locks matter. Distribution matters. Transparency matters.

When those things are missing, hype fills the gap. And hype is fragile.

The data here wasn’t subtle. It was loud, fast, and unforgiving. Traders who ignored it paid the price. And the next memecoin with a famous name attached will almost certainly test the same limits again.

 

Because in this market, the charts always tell the truth eventually.

 

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