Why Solana Has Become One of the Leading Blockchain Platforms for Institutional Adoption

One of the biggest questions facing Wall Street right now is should institutions build on a single blockchain or across many others.

Nick Dukoff is here to help us answer that.

He's with the Solano Foundation, and he just stepped off a panel here at the Zero Onchain Brokerage Summit where some of the biggest names in crypto were debating that exact question.

Nick, welcome to FinTech TV.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

So, Nick, let's talk about the, the stage you were on.

You were just talking about one of the biggest debates in crypto right now.

One chain or many chains.

Give us the quick version on what that means to you.

Yeah, well, I think if you're gonna choose one chain, there's one obvious one, which is Solana, and for a number of different reasons.

Uh, but I think it's OK if you wanna build on more than one blockchain too, and we see that as long as, of course, Solana is included as part of that mix.

You know, if you look at the key dimensions of success right now for Solana and why institutions are choosing Solana, 7 GSIBs out of 29 have built on Solana, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citi, BNY, CIte General, uh, Standard Chartered.

Uh, you've got $3 billion in real-world assets on Solana and over 95% of tokenized equities volume.

So I think there's like real consolidation happening around Solana.

However, However, I, I don't know that you need to necessarily believe that there's gonna be one chain to rule them all, but I think in whatever future there is, Salon is gonna be a really important part of it.

So, let's get into the big news.

We know that, um, Bailey Gifford, uh, they just launched the UK's first fully regulated tokenized fund.

That blockchain is a legal record here, not a wrapper.

So why does that really matter?

It's very exciting.

So that's the Bailey Gifford high yield fund.

Uh, baggy, B A G E Y, and it's tremendously exciting because what the Bailey Gifford team did is right now, uh, many of the firms that are tokenizing on chain, they're still maintaining off-chain books and records while also having the tokenization.

And so that actually creates uh 2 times the amount of work.

So you're not really getting the efficiencies that the blockchain promises.

But what Bailey Gifford did was they said, OK, we're gonna use the blockchain as the ledger of record for the fund, and so the token represents the asset itself.

And I think that's really an important um step forward in the industry in terms of tokenization, especially for a regulated institution in the UK by the FCA like Bailey Gifford.

So, all funds, they just uh brought tokenized funds to Solana, opening the doors, and I wanna get this right, 3300 asset managers and Solana just crossed over to the $3 billion in real-world assets.

What is driving that growth?

Yeah, so the exciting thing about the all funds partnership.

Which we're, which we're truly um pleased to have announced with them last week, is they have $1.8 trillion asset under management across those 3300 that you mentioned.

And so when you think about how are we going to grow $3 billion into trillions of real-world assets, it's gonna require distribution.

And yes, Solana has lots of distribution, um, between 80 and 100 million monthly active wallets on the network.

However, somebody like all funds, which already has access to investors all around the world, can help really accelerate that.

So that we go from $3 billion in real-world assets to trillions.

So, let's talk about stocks.

Now, people can get the tokenized exposure to companies like SpaceX, and, and that's a private company that most investors could have never touched.

So, what does that Actually work for the everyday investor.

How does that work for the everyday investor?

Yeah, so it's, it's really exciting.

There's a variety of, of, of ways to access tokenized equities on Solana.

You've got public equities like Kraken, Ando, Superstate, and even, uh, Bullish, a public company, recently acquired Aquinity, which is the second largest transfer agent for $4.2 billion in an all-stock deal.

And the first instance of them tokenizing was their own stock, Bullish stock on Solana.

When you talk about pre-IPO companies like SpaceX recently IPO, but prior to that, they were available to, uh, be, uh, invested in on Solana, uh, you have an exciting number of options.

So Prestocks is a company that's tokenizing pre-IPO equities on Solana, as is Republic.

And so for Republic, they had tokenized OpenAI, SpaceX, a number of others, and Bitget, uh, which is a large exchange in APAC and around the world, were distributing it to their users.

And so it was really Uh, exactly what we hope to see with this idea of democratizing access to investment products around the world.

Solana has this vision of what we call internet capital markets, which is connecting the 5.5 billion internet users around the world with all of the world's global assets in a single liquidity venue.

And things like SpaceX prior to their IPO making that available to those 5.5 billion people is really something, uh, that inspires us and, and, and, and why this Solana blockchain exists.

All right, so the big question is, looking ahead, what should institutions watching this expect Solana, uh, over the next years?

Like, what's going on in the future and what do you guys have planned?

Yeah, so we, we're hitting, you know, uh, new highs almost every day in, in most of the KPIs that, that we track, and it's, it's really, uh, exciting.

And I think you're really starting to see this, um, flywheel happening where, you know, going back to that internet capital markets vision, you've got investors on, on the one hand.

Uh, and assets on the other, more assets attract more investors.

More investors attracts more assets, and, and that really becomes kind of like a self-fulfilling, uh, flywheel.

And, and so I think what you're gonna see in the next year and, and 2 years and 5 years and 10 years is just more, more, more of everything, you know, more people connected to Solana, more assets, uh, listed on Solana, and, and really that internet capital markets vision coming to life.

Uh, so, Nick, thanks so much for joining us here on FinTech TV.

Thanks so much for having me.