‘The doors have blown open’ — how Solana is courting Wall Street as memecoins flame out

Once a mecca for quirky memecoins, Solana’s next move is shaping up to be rather important.

That’s because joke coins lost their mojo not long after they peaked.

In January, more than 70,000 Solana memecoins were hitting the market every day, and SOL surged 20% that month and outpaced other top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.

By May, the number of memecoins offered on Solana more than halved as controversy, including the firestorm around President Donald Trump’s memecoin, cast a pall on the market.

Now, Solana’s backers are shifting gears as it seeks new business in a very old industry — Wall Street.

Apollo Global Management, the private equity giant, launched one of its largest funds on the network, and Solana’s token has drawn investment from Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital fund.

Flurry of moves

In the last few weeks, the sixth-largest blockchain with a $82 billion market value has experienced a flurry of moves to broaden its business beyond degens and racy tokens.

In May, the Solana Foundation struck a tokenisation deal with R3, a global software group which manages $10 billion in tokenised assets for Euroclear, HSBC, and Bank of America, among other traditional finance giants.

Over the last two months, three publicly listed companies bought millions in SOL tokens to add to their balance sheet in a manifestation of Michael Syalor’s Bitcoin treasury strategy.

Solana Labs, the development team behind the network, has even opened a swank new headquarters in Lower Manhattan called Skyline.

‘Doing memcoins with this tech is super limited. There is a much bigger market.’

Jean Herelle, CrunchDAO

For an industry that prides itself on remote work and pseudonymity, creating a base defies the ethos of DeFi. But it’s been a breath of fresh air for some developers.

“Having a building is such a good move because everybody is there,” said Jean Herelle, the founder of CrunchDAO.

“You go to New York, you spend a week, and you can go to a building and ask a question directly to the tech team of Solana.”

He added that members of the Solana Foundation, the non-profit organisation stewarding the network, also roam the halls.

Moreover, the hub has set the tone for what comes next by demonstrating that Solana Labs isn’t shy about taking a page from the playbook of traditional businesses.

Solana has established its brand around delivering ultra-fast transaction speeds at a fraction of the cost of its nearest competitors, namely Ethereum.

In the last 24 hours, Solana has reached more than 4,000 transactions per second at an average cost of half a penny, according to data from Solscan.

“Doing memcoins with this tech is super limited. There is a much bigger market,” said Herelle. “I call this institutional scale. Black hole. Trillions of dollars.”

Trading strategies

Herelle, who made the leap from Ethereum to Solana in 2024, said speed was a key reason CrunchDAO made the switch.

CrunchDAO uses machine learning to draw out trends from blockchain activity, a crucial demand for financial institutions looking to build out trading strategies or products for their clients.

Herelle said that thanks to connections from the Solana Labs team, he’s been able to meet with executives at Franklin Templeton and BlackRock in person at the Skyline office.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Solana can successfully transition to become the go-to blockchain for financial firms.

“I’ll see if they can do that,” John Nahas, the chief business officer of the development team behind competing layer-1 Avalanche, told DL News in April. “The casino is trying to be a bank.”

‘Let’s be frank, it doesn’t help if we build something together and it blows up.’

Christine Moy, Apollo

Analysts at Standard Chartered said in May that Solana’s price performance will continue to drag as memecoin speculation dries up.

“We may indeed be past peak meme,” wrote Geoff Kendrick. “As a result, we expect Solana to underperform Ethereum over the next two to three years, before catching up.”

Ethereum’s dominance

Meanwhile, Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain, still far outpaces Solana across nearly every institutional metric, including stablecoin issuance, tokenised funds, and decentralised financial activity.

Ethereum commands nearly two-thirds of the $247 billion DeFi sector, while Solana holds just 9%, according to DefiLlama. Solana representatives declined to comment for this article.

Yet, the Solana Foundation has proven to be a nimble organisation capable of tapping into trends faster than the more established Ethereum network.

In April, Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital invested $50 million in a new staked SOL fund in Canada. And Apollo, which manages $785 billion in assets, rolled out its $1.5 billion diversified credit fund on Solana in May.

What once traded for roughly a nickel in 2024, stock in SOL Strategies, the largest corporate holder of SOL, has since risen 3,900% and has been included in two of Invesco’s crypto exchange-traded funds.

Washington presence

“We went from penny stock land to being allocated in some of the most powerful asset management ETFs that have requirements for who can receive allocations,” Leah Wald, the CEO of SOL Strategies, told DL News.

At the same time, supporters are strengthening the network’s presence in Washington as Congress and the Trump administration establish a regulatory framework for the crypto industry.

In March, prominent crypto lobbyists established the Solana Policy Institute, a lobbying group to educate regulators on the role of decentralised networks like Solana.

“Their goal is for lawmakers to think of Bitcoin and then, in the next breath, think about Solana in a tier all by itself, aside from a lot of these other tokens that are out there, including Ethereum,” John Darsie, a partner at Skybridge Capital, told DL News.

Investors like what they see — SOL has skyrocketed more than 640% in the last two years compared to Ethereum’s 45% jump.

“There’s the first mover advantage, and then there’s the innovator, right?” Michael Cahill, the CEO of oracle developer Douro Labs, told DL News.

“The innovator has to be an order of magnitude faster to disrupt, and I think that Solana has been very successful.”

DeFi stalwart

While plagued by a series of outages from 2020 to 2024, Solana has been in the thick of key developments in DeFi.

Serum, one of the first decentralised exchanges launched on Solana in 2020, showed onchain exchanges could compete with centralised versions.

Serum eventually shuttered in 2022 after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, which held control over Serum’s smart contracts.

In 2023, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, bloomed on Solana and even briefly outpaced total sales on Ethereum, according to CryptoSlam, an NFT analytics provider.

‘Understanding the technical and economic landscape is critical.’

Kyle Gannon, QuickNode,

Following the launch of Pump.fun in 2024, the Solana network established itself as the go-to blockchain for memecoins.

The project lets anyone create a memecoin with just a few clicks. Pump.fun added a livestream feature that creators could use to gin up a captive audience on different social channels.

That feature was eventually removed after one user filmed themselves being hanged. A DL News investigation later revealed that the suicide attempt was a fake.

Still, the project went viral and became one of the most successful mechanisms for onboarding users to the Solana ecosystem.

Pump.fun has generated more than 11 million different memecoins since its inception, over $520 million in total cumulative revenue, and spawned more than 18.8 million new Solana addresses, according to stats collected on Dune Analytics.

Various advantages

Replacing all that action is precisely why Solana backers are turning to larger banks and fund managers.

On an April afternoon, executives from VanEck, Fidelity, and Apollo filed into Solana’s Skyline office on East Houston Street in New York.

It was meant to be a primer for financial institutions on the various advantages Solana offers, Kyle Gannon, a marketing manager for QuickNode, told DL News. QuickNode sponsored the event.

“It’s a massive push,” he told DL News. “Understanding the technical and economic landscape is critical, especially if you’re at one of these major institutions.”

Tokenised credit

Some audience members were further along the learning curve than others.

Christine Moy, Apollo’s head of digital assets, laid out the firm’s crypto strategy to a captive audience.

She explained how its tokenised credit fund could be used further within DeFi, how crypto companies can work with Apollo, and, of course, risk.

“Let’s be frank,” said Moy. “It doesn’t help the ecosystem if we build something together and it blows up.”

She also reminded the audience that the firm isn’t going anywhere.

Flanked by Nick Ducoff, the Solana Foundation’s head of institutional, Moy said she’s all in.

“There isn’t anything holding us back at this point,” she said. “I’m ready to go gangbusters if you are. The doors have been blown open.”

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.