Solana At Six: From Meme Street to Wall Street

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.