Latest news with #SolanaFoundation
Crypto Insight
24-05-2025
- Business
- Crypto Insight
Solana ‘will make everyone an investor' — Solana nCMO
The current structure of capital markets is failing to serve a broad base of investors, according to Akshay BD, non-chief marketing officer at the Solana Foundation. During a panel at the Accelerate 2025 conference, Akshay argued that blockchain technology could help address these shortcomings, claiming that Solana could 'make everyone an investor or a dreamer over time.' Akshay noted growing uncertainty among investors, citing concerns from investment managers who report heightened anxiety among clients. 'You have low bond yields, you have asset price bubbles, and people don't really know how the traditional asset allocation model works anymore,' he said. The 60-40 portfolio hasn't delivered consistent returns in a long time.' He attributed some of this tension to a widening gap between income earned through wages and wealth accumulated through asset ownership. Retail investors, he added, are often locked out of private markets, which are typically accessible only to accredited investors — a dynamic that may be contributing to overheated public markets. Akshay warned that the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence could further deepen existing economic divides. 'The question is, which way do we go?' he asked. 'Is it […] universal basic income, where we're essentially creating a welfare economy to support those unable to keep jobs or own assets? Or is it what we propose, universal basic ownership, where everybody with a mobile phone can own assets?' He outlined a vision in which crypto infrastructure enables broader asset ownership, allowing individuals to invest in everything from energy companies to local coffee shops through tokenization. In this model, acquiring an ownership stake could be as easy as scanning a QR code. In the Solana ecosystem, the 'Non-Chief Marketing Officer' (nCMO) is a role within the Solana Foundation that focuses on supporting the Solana community's marketing efforts. Markets remain above historical averages Public equity markets in the US have been trading above their historical valuation norms for a long time. According to data from market analytics firm Multpl, the S&P 500's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has consistently remained above 19.6 since December 2018, higher than the index's historical average P/E ratio of around 16.1 and suggesting that investors have been willing to pay a premium for earnings in recent years. Zooming out, the S&P 500's average valuation has been gradually rising for decades, driven by factors such as low interest rates, growing corporate gains, and investor optimism about technology. However, high valuations have also coincided with periods of market corrections, like the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. According to Akshay, a way to combat this overheating is to open up certain markets to retail investors, a lofty goal that some sectors of crypto, like RWA tokenization, aim to facilitate. Akshay noted that some entrepreneurs had tried this before, but the available technology didn't support this view. '[Crypto] starts with the game, and very quickly becomes profound.' 'What it gives you is the ability for you to financialize all the productive assets in an economy, so you can have anybody who participates in that economy be an owner of that economy,' he said. Source:
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Major TradFi Institutions to Pursue Tokenization Efforts on Solana
A number of large banks and other traditional financial (TradFi) institutions are set to use the Solana blockchain for their tokenization efforts. R3, a U.K. developer of blockchain technology for financial institutions, is teaming up with the Solana Foundation to bring the former's clients and their tokenized real-world assets to Solana. Through its blockchain platform, Corda, R3 holds over $10 billion in assets and counts the likes of HSBC, Bank of America, Bank of Italy and the Monetary Authority of Singapore among its participants. Tokenization, the term for minting real-world assets such as stocks and bonds as digital tokens that can be traded on decentralized networks, is one of the principal use cases of blockchain technology attracting the attention and investment of the TradFi world. A recent report by Boston Consulting Group and crypto payments company Ripple said the tokenization market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. R3's aim is to supercharge the scale and liquidity of the tokenized asset ecosystem by making the assets available on a public blockchain like Solana. The total value of assets held on Solana may be dwarfed by Ethereum, but it processes more transactions and has more active addresses. "As the world's most used public blockchain, Solana ... [is] the ideal foundation for the next generation of regulated digital finance," R3 said in an announcement on Thursday.
Finextra
22-05-2025
- Business
- Finextra
R3 connects to Solana
R3 and Solana Foundation today announce a strategic collaboration to bring regulated financial institutions and their real-world assets onto Solana. 0 It will deliver the first enterprise-grade, permissioned consensus service offered to the public directly on a Layer 1 network. This brings the institutional TradFi and DeFi worlds into true convergence, marrying the unparalleled reach of R3 into the TradFi ecosystem with the scale, liquidity, and innovation of internet capital markets. As the world's most used public blockchain, the Solana blockchain offers unmatched performance, low fees, and a vibrant global ecosystem - making it the ideal foundation for the next generation of regulated digital finance. R3 has invited Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, to R3's Board of Directors, marking a strategic shift for R3 that unites the strengths of public and permissioned blockchains. Solana and R3 will bring regulated assets onto a public blockchain at a time when the RWA sector is at a pivotal juncture: regulatory tailwinds are spurring investor confidence in digital assets, financial institutions are becoming increasingly comfortable with leveraging public networks, and the DeFi sector is maturing. These forces are driving growing demand for high-quality, tokenized assets on public networks. As the world's largest collection of permissioned RWA networks, with over $10 billion in regulated assets on-chain across its platforms, the R3 ecosystem is ideally positioned to meet this demand. R3's Corda has the most live, in-production use cases and millions of transactions processed daily by leading institutional players. Integrating with Solana's blockchain will enable these assets to flow to meet the growing demand on public networks, and unlock new settlement options across these ecosystems, including using high-quality stablecoins. Unlike traditional interoperability approaches, this comprehensive integration means private transactions on Corda can be confirmed directly on Solana mainnet, inheriting the network's performance and security, and enabling true transactional atomicity. The collaboration will create a consensus service deployed on Solana to enable native interoperability between R3's existing Corda platform - as well as other private networks - and Solana, bridging the gap between permissioned and public blockchain ecosystems for the first time. This will enable regulated financial institutions - including banks, financial market infrastructure providers, and asset managers - to fully harness the openness and efficiency of Solana without re-writing their applications or compromising on compliance, security, or asset control. R3 chose Solana as its public Layer-1 substrate and the basis for its new consensus service following an extensive evaluation and technical review of decentralized protocols, selecting Solana for its low transaction fees, speed, scalability, as well as the Solana ecosystem's robust developer community, and relationships with numerous regulated financial institutions, including Blackrock, Franklin Templeton, and Hamilton Lane which have all deployed regulated assets on the network. Critically, this collaboration simplifies the complexity of managing RWAs on public blockchains - bringing Corda's proven strengths in identity, privacy, and compliance to a public and permissioned environment. This allows traditional financial institutions to operate with the same control and clarity they expect from enterprise-grade infrastructure, while unlocking the scale and flexibility of a public network. 'This is a major step forward for the institutional adoption of public blockchain," said Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation. "R3's decision to bring its regulated financial network onto Solana is powerful validation that public blockchains have reached institutional readiness. With Solana's unmatched performance, enterprise-grade permissioning, and growing roster of regulated assets, we're not just witnessing convergence between TradFi and DeFi - we're enabling it. This collaboration signifies that the future of capital markets will be built on public infrastructure. We're thrilled that the Solana ecosystem is leading the way." David E. Rutter, Founder and CEO of R3 commented: 'We've never pursued blockchain for its own sake - our mission is to solve real financial problems. After years of laying the groundwork, R3 is ready to bring our experience and our network of regulated financial institutions towards a new public future with one of the best and most trusted public ecosystems - Solana. This is more than a milestone; it's a strategic realignment for the entire industry. We know DeFi isn't coming to TradFi, so it's up to us to build the connective infrastructure that links these two ecosystems. This is about adapting to deliver real-world utility, institutional-grade readiness, and shaping the long-term future of regulated markets.' Clearstream, a leading post-trade infrastructure provider at the forefront of digitizing financial markets, is a long-standing user of R3's Corda which underpins its digital collateral solution. Jens Hachmeister, Head of Issuer Services & New Digital Markets at Clearstream, commented: 'Tokenization isn't just about digitizing assets - it's about building scalable, global infrastructure where real-world assets can interact directly and securely, no matter where investors are located. The convergence of public and private blockchains is no longer a future promise - it's happening now. This is a generational shift in how value moves, and a compelling moment for any institution looking to enter the crypto space. We're excited for what's ahead.'
Crypto Insight
18-05-2025
- Business
- Crypto Insight
The Public internet is a bottleneck for blockchain — DoubleZero CEO
Public internet infrastructure is the critical speed and performance constraint on high-throughput blockchain networks, according to Austin Federa, co-founder and CEO of DoubleZero, a project developing high-speed fiber optic communication rails for blockchains. 'The downside of the public internet is it was never built for high-performance systems. It was always built for this sort of relationship of one big server talking to one little server,' Federa told Cointelegraph in an interview at Consensus 2025. The executive explained: 'We have validators all around the world. Rotating leader schedules all the time. And then they switch from having to be massive consumers of data to extremely massive broadcasters of data. So that means that they need huge amounts of resources both on ingress and egress.' The executive added that the constraint posed by public internet infrastructure is now the limiting factor in blockchain performance and not compute power or software development. Networks like DoubleZero will make blockchains faster, decrease spreads in decentralized finance (DeFi) trades, lower transaction fees, and open up new use cases for blockchain networks that were previously unavailable due to communication infrastructure constraints. DoubleZero co-founded by Austin Federa in 2024 Austin Federa left the Solana Foundation to establish the DoubleZero Protocol in December 2024. The goal of the project is to reduce latency, the time it takes for data to travel in a network, and bandwidth — the maximum data traffic a network can handle at once. In April 2025, DoubleZero conducted a validator token sale to sell token purchase agreements to interested node operators seeking to become validators for the network. The token sale was only available to accredited investors and already active validators on high-throughput blockchain networks including, Solana, Celestia, Sui, Aptos, and Avalanche. DoubleZero's team is aiming to launch its public mainnet in the second half of 2025, following a successful $28 million capital raise. Federa told Cointelegraph that the increasingly high throughput of blockchain networks and the overall development of the industry has necessitated the building of dedicated, high-performance communication infrastructure to meet demand from increasingly sophisticated projects. Source:
Business Mayor
24-04-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
Solana: 150 validators to be removed – A gamble on decentralization?
Solana Foundation will cut support for validators with less than 1000 SOL external stake. 150 validators will be affected; 900 operators could be axed if the program is scrapped. The Solana[SOL] Foundation will cut support for about 150 validators in a push for self-reliance and more network decentralization. In an X post on the 23rd of April, Mert Mumtaz, Helius Labs founder and developer support for Solana, deemed the update bullish and stated , 'Solana Foundation is now gradually reducing the number of validators it delegates to incentivize nodes to be more self-reliant. Extremely bullish.' Source: X A risky bet on decentralization? For closure, n odes or validators stake SOL to propose blocks and ensure network security effectively. Removing validators that rely solely on the Foundation's Delegated Program (SFDP) for staked SOL could affect small operators. According to on-chain researcher Dan Smith, about 150 validators will be axed by the policy. Source: Blockworks The attached chart shows that the Foundation validator support accounted for 20% of the total stake as of 2022 (over 80 million SOL). This has declined to 40 million SOL as of 2025, about 10.5% of the total stake. There were about 1,224 active Solana validators at the time of writing, with a total staked SOL of 389.4 million tokens. Blockworks data revealed that about 900 out of the 1,224 validators were supported by the SFDP, but the top nodes/validators don't rely on the Foundation. That said, validator operator revenue has dropped from $15.9 million to $1.3 million between January and April, and could put more downward pressure on small validators. In fact, Helius Labs warned about this last year, 'We estimate that if the SFDP were to be immediately discontinued, approximately 897 of the program's participants—accounting for 57% of all Solana validators—would struggle to maintain profitable operations.' Source: Santiment Overall market sentiment was negative for the past two days, and the validator update didn't change anything. Simply put, the SOL price could falter at $150 unless BTC climbs higher towards $100K. On the price chart, price action was still strong per Stochastic RSI and whale positioning (green Whale vs Retail Dleta indicator). However, bulls need to reclaim the $150-$160 level (red) to demonstrate greater strength.
