‘It’s So Early’: How Solana Is Competing With Ethereum for Institutional Interest

It would be easy for a casual observer to think that the Solana network is for memecoins and Ethereum for financial institutions.

While BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has preached the gospel of tokenization on Ethereum — his firm even launching a tokenized fund, BUIDL, on that blockchain — Solana has often made headlines this year thanks to the success of pump.fun, a protocol that allows users to create memecoins in minutes.

That, however, doesn’t mean Ethereum has a monopoly on institutional interest, according to Hadley Stern, chief commercial officer at Marinade Finance, a Solana-based DeFi protocol that provides staking services for that blockchain’s (SOL) token.

“On the institutional side, it’s so early,” Stern, who was the founding president of Fidelity Digital Assets and global head of digital asset custody at BNY Mellon, told CoinDesk in an interview. “We could probably count on one hand the amount of TradFi products that are being built or have been built on Ethereum and Solana.”

“I was brought on [Marinade] because there’s a lot of product discovery around strong interest from institutions,” Stern said. “Asset managers, high net worth holders, individual holders, hedge funds … are interested in [staking on Solana].”

Launched in March 2020, Solana and SOL exploded on the crypto scene during the 2021 bull market partially thanks to support from FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. SOL cratered when FTX collapsed, but staged a comeback in 2023 and, at $79 billion, is now the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Stern’s assessment comes as financial giants such as Franklin Templeton, Citibank and Société Générale all announced new Solana-based projects last September during Breakpoint, the network’s biggest yearly conference. And he wasn’t the only one electrified by such institutional enthusiasm.

“At Breakpoint, it was eye-opening to see how many people are now building on Solana,” Tristan Frizza, founder of Solana-based decentralized derivatives exchange Zeta Markets, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Institutions are doing pretty crazy stuff.”

At first view, building on Ethereum can seem like a no-brainer for financial institutions. After all, it’s the oldest and largest smart contract blockchain, it has the largest number of developers in the crypto ecosystem, it settles the majority of stablecoin transactions and it’s the birthplace of DeFi. “If you work at a large bank and you’re trying to tokenize an asset, you’re not going to get fired for putting it on Ethereum,” Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan recently told CoinDesk.

But Ethereum isn’t risk-free, according to Leah Wald, CEO of Sol Strategies, a crypto holding company that also runs a large Solana validator.

“The uncertainty that continues around transaction fees certainly doesn’t make anyone comfortable,” Wald told CoinDesk in an interview. “If you’re going to be if you’re an institution, and you’re thinking 10 years out, you can’t be building on a blockchain that you’re concerned about.”

“BlackRock’s BUIDL is based on Ethereum, and for what they’re trying to build, I think that’s perfectly fine,” Wald added, but any kind of projects with high-volume transactions, like real-time payments or trading, might struggle. “If we’re talking about a more sophisticated on-chain fund, or a financial platform, then there’s a real opportunity for Solana.”

In other words, nothing currently guarantees that Ethereum’s scalability strategy, which hinges on layer 2 blockchains, will pay off, and the transformations the network has undergone in the last few years — like its monetary policy change, or its transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake — show that Ethereum is still figuring itself out.

Solana’s cheap transactions and low throughput, by contrast, don’t hinge on the accomplishment of a complex and technical roadmap. And that can make all the difference.

Wald noted, however, that in the U.S., Ethereum benefits from more regulatory clarity than Solana. The fact that the Securities and Exchange Commission approved spot ether exchange-traded funds this summer is likely a reassurance for institutions, even as inflows into those new funds have been disappointing. A spot SOL ETF might be years away, depending on the outcome of today’s presidential election.

Another point where Solana tends to be underestimated, Frizza said, is in terms of technical innovations. While Ethereum is famous for its army of developers, builders on Solana tend to fly under the radar, even when they come up with new tools and products that can have an impact on crypto ecosystems beyond their own.

“People underrate what Solana enables from a structural perspective — and also the mindset that Solana builders have,” Frizza said. “They really care about users, the product, building things that scale and that address user needs.”

To Frizza, that attitude means that, if another crypto mania occurs again, fascinating apps will come to light on Solana. Speaking of Zeta Markets, he said one priority was to “bring down UX barriers and make it feel as easy as trading on Robinhood. That’s when you can really start opening up the funnel and bringing a lot of people in.”

Stern concurred. Memecoins aren’t an innovation in themselves, he said, but the fact they were able to flourish on Solana in a way they couldn’t on any other platform is a symptom of developers working at the highest level: pump.fun is simply taking advantage of a technical breakthrough. “Ethereum has a very hands-off relationship with an open source viewpoint, whereas I think the Solana Foundation does a better job from a business development standpoint,” Stern said. “Sort of guiding the ship, but not in a completely controlling way, and letting a thousand flowers bloom.”