According to the new report published by Messari, Solana became one of the projects that attracted attention in the first quarter of the year, attracting intense interest from classical financial institutions and payment companies. Although the crypto market has generally stagnated, Solana has managed to stand out with both institutional and technological developments.
BlackRock, BUIDL fund and new investments
BUIDL, a tokenized money market fund created in collaboration with BlackRock and Securitize, increased its volume on Solana to $525.4 million. While this success was achieved with Anchorage Digital providing custody support to the fund, it was stated that Anchorage held approximately 81 percent of the BUIDL supply in the Solana network at the end of the quarter. These steps revealed that Solana has come to the fore as an infrastructure provider in the field of tokenized finance.
Growing corporate activities in the network
Another development that stood out in the quarter was the steps taken by traditional finance companies in connection with Solana. Ondo Finance has added more than 200 tokenized stocks and ETFs on Solana through its platform, Ondo Global Markets. Franklin Templeton company also collaborated with Ondo and brought tokenized ETFs to the blockchain environment. Additionally, Citigroup completed a trial run on Solana for tokenized trade finance in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Payment industry and stablecoin ecosystem
According to the report, Visa, Stripe, Worldpay, Western Union and PayPal have benefited from the fast transaction and low fee advantages of Solana infrastructure in the last year. These companies have either moved to Solana integration for stablecoin payments or directly launched Solana-based payment services. Especially thanks to its low transaction fees and instant money transfers, Solana has become a more frequently preferred platform in the payment industry.
Solana has also achieved significant success in terms of the stablecoin market. As of the end of the quarter, the stablecoin market value on Solana reached $14.85 billion, thus ranking third among blockchains. When we look at the transfer volume, there was a 13 percent increase in the three-month period and a total of 246.8 billion dollars of transactions were carried out.
Chain revenue and technical advances
Even though crypto prices have been on the decline, Solana’s on-chain transaction volume and revenues have stabilized. Application revenues, referred to as “Chain GDP” by Messari’s definition, remained stable at approximately $342.2 million in the first quarter.
The report also noted that there was a transformation in the nature of the activity in Solana. It was stated that the adoption of the new generation, high-frequency trading infrastructure, especially known as “Prop AMM”, has accelerated and that these technologies offer more competitive prices and transaction quality compared to centralized exchanges.
In the Messari report, while defining Solana’s upcoming Alpenglow network update as one of the most important technical steps of the network, it was emphasized that with this update, transaction accuracy will be reduced from approximately 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. It was assessed that this improvement in performance could strengthen Solana’s place in payments, tokenized finance and artificial intelligence-based applications.
