Over the past several months, we’ve reconnected with Solana’s global builder and investor communities at the Accelerate event in New York City and at Hacker Houses in Budapest, Berlin, and London.
These gatherings offered valuable insight into the direction of the ecosystem and the evolving opportunities for infrastructure and application development.
At Accelerate, we conducted an on-the-ground survey to capture sentiment across key themes relevant to tokenization on Solana, including overall tokenization activity, technical bottlenecks developers face, user experience, and ecosystem growth drivers.
Combined with insights from RockawayX portfolio company founders and our internal perspective, this article offers a snapshot of how Solana is progressing and where builders see the most potential for long-term value creation.
Builder Confidence Is High As Solana Gains Ground
Despite broader market volatility and shifting macro conditions, Solana builders remain overwhelmingly optimistic about the network’s long-term trajectory.
By a wide margin, our survey respondents believe the price of SOL will be higher on January 1, 2026, than it is today. For many, this outlook is grounded in Solana’s expanding ecosystem of builders.
Mobile integrations; software updates like Alpenglow (Anza’s new consensus protocol that just passed governance) and Firedancer (Jump’s new independent validator client) being developed to improve reliability, performance, and client diversity); underlying network infrastructure upgrades like DoubleZero; and a growing roster of consumer apps are transforming the chain into a more mature and vibrant economy.
RockawayX Remains Long-Term Optimistic
Our long-term thesis positions Solana as the foundational layer of asset tokenization and the clear frontrunner to become the internet’s financial infrastructure.
Due to its speed, performance, and existing community strength, we see Solana as critical infrastructure for the frictionless exchange of global assets—equities, commodities, etc.—within a permissionless ecosystem. This makes SOL an essential-to-own yield-bearing asset, as it earns returns through staking and onchain financial products and serves as the core fee currency powering the crypto’s dominant application layer.
Since Accelerate, this thesis has already begun to play out. In one standout example, platforms like Kamino—the first major borrow/lend DeFi protocol to complete the integration—and Ranger have integrated xStocks, tokenized stocks that represent Apple, Tesla, and more.
As of August 25, since the launch of xStocks—tokenized stocks backed 1:1 by the underlying security—on June 30, Solana has become the clear leader in stock-based RWAs, accounting for an average of 94.3% of daily trading volume in tokenized equities across all blockchains. The day before the xStocks launch, Solana captured .1% of total volume.
Within only two months of launch, xStocks has achieved over $3 billion in cumulative trading volume across CEXs and DEXs, with over 25,000 unique holders now participating in the asset class.
However, despite the optimism our team shares with ecosystem participants, the SOL/ETH chart has been virtually down only since late April (after nearly a 700-day uptrend), with institutional demand for Ether surging, especially in digital asset treasury companies (DATs) like BlockRock’s ETHA fund.
With tokenization being heavily dependent on institutional adoption, but price action indicating institutional favoritism to ETH, the Solana ecosystem is now under pressure to mount a response effort and reclaim lost ground.
Catalysts for Growth: Infrastructure, Regulation, and Real-World Finance
When asked what would be most impactful for Solana’s growth, 65% of respondents identified regulatory clarity as the top factor.
We also see clear rules, like the CLARITY and GENIUS acts passed in July, as the catalyst for tokenization to play out fully.
The GENIUS Act establishes a clear regulatory framework for stablecoins, ensuring they are properly defined and responsibly managed. The legislation bodes well for Circle and other existing stablecoin issuers, as well as for the DeFi ecosystems, like Solana, that they underpin. Moving forward, protocol builders will have peace of mind in (stable) settlement mechanisms, and onchain liquidity providers (i.e., investors) will have greater confidence in market stability and leading collateral assets. In this way, we expect the Act to serve as a tailwind for protocol innovation and onchain capital deployment.
The CLARITY Act affirms that decentralized tokens are not pursuant to securities law, giving more clarity to DeFi protocol builders and users alike. In recent years, we have seen many founders spend considerable time and resources appraising their regulatory standing. With this pressure alleviated, they can focus on delivering novel financial products and experiences.
In addition to spawning innovation, respondents’ strong emphasis on compliance reflects a broader pivot toward institutional readiness, especially in regions like the United States, United Arab Emirates, and across APAC, where policy direction is actively shaping innovation.
Another 18% of respondents pointed to tokenizing traditional financial instruments, and 11% cited physical infrastructure advancements, such as Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN), as key growth drivers. Collectively, these responses signal meaningful interest in orienting Solana’s growth around tangible, real-world-based use cases.
Encouragingly, only 6% of respondents selected rate cuts—our proxy for the macro environment—as the primary growth driver, signaling greater enthusiasm for factors within operators’ control and the structural opportunities inherent to the network.
In interviews, our founders emphasized that growth will depend on improving user experience across the board, whether through simpler interfaces, novel applications, or enhancements to network-level infrastructure.
Barrett, CEO of Ranger, pointed to these needs by highlighting that a Hyperliquid can’t yet be built on Solana; protocol-level mechanisms must become more competitive.
“In crypto, trading is the leading segment that has shown PMF aside from stablecoins and payments. If we want to see the most Solana growth, I think Solana needs to continue improving protocol-level mechanisms to be more competitive with the likes of Hyperliquid—you can’t quite build a Hyperliquid on Solana today. Part of this comes down to how the scheduler works; jitter can introduce market microstructure challenges for Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs). I’m still a big believer that if you want to have the largest DeFi economy, you’re going to need an order book implementation. Spot markets lead on Solana, but a robust derivatives exchange would be a major growth driver. Outside of trading, crypto is very stagnant. The second growth driver I’d look for is a viral consumer application that can attract those who aren’t crypto native. It would be a big driver of onchain activity, or at least users of the Solana blockchain.”
RockawayX’s Three Total Value Locked (TVL) Growth Catalysts
At RockawayX, we believe Solana's next phase of growth will be driven by a confluence of technological advancements, the institutionalisation and tokenisation of TradFi assets, and ecosystem app activity. If this plays out as we expect, it will yield a meaningful increase in TVL.
We see several positive catalysts in each of these areas:
Technological advancements like Alpenglow and Firedancer—targeting sub-100ms latency and throughput exceeding 1 million transactions per second—will unlock a new class of economic activity onchain, positioning Solana as the premier venue for tokenization. Perpetual futures on platforms like Jupiter are already generating meaningful revenue, and projects like Bullet.xyz are building CLOBs that could make market-making more efficient and less risky. By narrowing spreads and improving execution, these innovations lay the groundwork for a decentralized Nasdaq-style trading experience.
Institutional participation and the tokenization of traditional financial assets are accelerating alongside improving regulatory clarity, particularly in the U.S. This shift enables capital managers to deploy scalable, dynamic yield strategies onchain, supported by an expanding set of protocols with diverse risk-return profiles. Stablecoins serve as the settlement layer, powering both DeFi and RWA transactions. Meanwhile, traditional financial infrastructure is beginning to move onto blockchain rails—Robinhood being a prominent recent example.
Ecosystem app activity comes down to courting the best builders and nurturing a culture of experimentation, which we believe Solana has done best. Many founders in our survey were nonplussed about Pump.Fun’s model, but applauded the quick growth and spirit of innovation it reflects.
Together, these signals point to a network moving beyond speculative use cases toward real financial utility. With the right infrastructure and regulatory frameworks in place, Solana is becoming a credible venue for capital markets on a global scale.
Technical Bottlenecks: Developer UX Needs Work
While Solana continues to lead on performance, builders still see gaps in the developer experience that must be addressed to better onboard additional developers to the ecosystem who can help tokenized markets on Solana scale. When asked about the biggest technical challenge they face, 47% of respondents pointed to developer documentation. Despite meaningful progress, available resources are often fragmented, outdated, or overly complex.
Other pain points included:
- Onchain data access (24%): Builders cited difficulty in querying both historical and real-time data as a consistent obstacle to development.
- Tooling ecosystem (18%): Respondents noted the need for better libraries, SDKs, and integrations that keep pace with the protocol’s rapid evolution.
- Smart contract risks (6%): A small subset pointed to the time-consuming and tedious work required to navigate ecosystem security and mitigate contract-level vulnerabilities.
- RPC reliability (6%): Some developers raised issues around endpoint stability and infrastructure-level disruptions during periods of heavy usage.
Stepan Simkin, Co-Founder and CEO of Squads, described the ongoing challenge of chasing the next bottleneck.
“It’s a funny thing. We tend to discover new limitations as soon as the old ones are lifted. For a while, we thought that once CPI limits were removed, everything would fall into place. But once that happened, we quickly realised there was more to solve. It’s hard to model or make projections with certainty. That said, especially over the past six months, we’ve seen meaningful progress. CPI limits have been raised, we just got a feature activation for P-256 native signature verification on Solana (which our team helped push forward), and we’re hopeful that transaction size limitations will be addressed next. In the long run, we’d love to see smart accounts and account abstraction become a more central part of Solana’s roadmap.”
RockawayX Sees Opportunity For RPC Improvements
We believe that significant improvements are still needed in the RPC layer of blockchain infrastructure, particularly on Solana. Current RPC services often lack intelligent routing, which leads to suboptimal transaction inclusion and latency.
We see an opportunity for programmable RPCs that can dynamically select validators based on real-time workload and responsiveness, ensuring faster and more reliable execution.
Additionally, enabling stored procedures or composite calls that execute logic closer to the validator nodes would reduce round-trips and improve geographic locality. These enhancements would meaningfully elevate the developer and end-user experience, and we are closely tracking teams building in this direction.
Scaling The Infrastructure And Expanding The Reach Of Solana Capital Markets
When asked which upcoming technical developments excite them most, 41% of respondents selected Firedancer. As a high-performance independent validator client developed by Jump, Firedancer is expected to significantly improve throughput, network resiliency, and client diversity. For many, it represents the technical foundation for scaling tokenization on Solana.
Austin Federa, Co-Founder and CEO of DoubleZero, emphasized the broader impact of Firedancer’s progress.
“Firedancer has been just as much a catalyst for pushing Anza’s Agave forward as it has been a breakthrough in its own right for what Jump is building. The healthy competition between the Anza and Firedancer teams has produced incredible progress for everyone on Solana.”
Another 35% of respondents pointed to the Solana Mobile stack. Builders see mobile-first design as essential to expanding the reach of applications beyond crypto-native users. Seamless wallet integrations and native mobile dApps could remove major onboarding friction, especially for consumers interacting with tokenized assets, payments, and onchain finance for the first time.
In August, Solana began delivering the Seeker, its second flagship mobile device, to users. As a follow-up to the Saga, which received heavy criticism from YouTube tech reviewer sensation Marques Brownlee, the Seeker has been welcomed with positive reviews, featuring a dApp store with over 100 apps, weight reduction, a shaved price, and upcoming AI/DePIN integrations.
In his article covering the device, Jack Kubinec of Blockworks said, “In creating the Solana Seeker, Solana Mobile seems to have taken its critics seriously, either reversing course or making significant upgrades on the Saga’s weak points. Overall, Solana Mobile seems to have exorcised its Saga demons to deliver a very solid new phone in the Seeker.”
He followed with: “Solana Mobile deserves credit for delivering a serious, grown-up smartphone.”
Outside of Solana Mobile, these developments also drew interest:
- DoubleZero (12%): Focused on reducing bandwidth and latency, with particular relevance for onchain solvers and low-latency financial use cases.
- ZK compression (6%): A scalability enhancement designed to reduce state bloat and improve chain efficiency.
- Private mempools (6%): Viewed as a way to create secure and customizable execution environments, especially important for MEV-sensitive strategies.
Together, these responses reflect a dual focus across the builder community: delivering the infrastructure required to support real-time financial activity and building user experiences that make onchain capital markets more accessible.
Building With Key Technical Advances In Solana’s Roadmap
At RockawayX, we believe that the next wave of growth in onchain capital markets will be unlocked by infrastructure that can meet the demands of real-time financial applications. We’re excited about Alpenglow, which is set to further lower blocktime and enhance transaction throughputs, and also about Firedancer and DoubleZero, which we’ve taken a hands-on approach with.
We were among the earliest to adopt Firedancer as a validator client and have already seen meaningful improvements in performance and resilience. Beyond its headline throughput gains, Firedancer introduces critical client diversity that strengthens the foundation of Solana’s validator ecosystem.
We have also invested in and closely collaborated with DoubleZero, becoming the network’s first European contributor. Earlier this year, we brought Prague online by connecting it to Frankfurt via a dedicated fiber line. We later launched a co-branded validator as part of DoubleZero’s 3 million SOL Delegation Program.
Looking ahead, we also recognize the tremendous potential of Jito’s upcoming Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM), which represents another leap forward in Solana’s execution infrastructure. By moving transaction ordering from validators to a network of hardware-secured nodes and enabling applications to define their own sequencing logic, BAM addresses long-standing MEV challenges, improves execution quality, and unlocks programmable blockspace for advanced financial primitives. For capital markets on Solana, this means fairer, latency-optimized markets, custom execution rules tailored to asset classes, and less incentive for projects to move off mainnet, keeping liquidity and order flow within Solana’s economy. Launching with a permissioned operator set before expanding toward decentralization, BAM could be a key catalyst for building competitive, institution-ready market infrastructure directly on Solana.
Emerging Sectors That Strengthen the Tokenization Foundation
Solana’s growth is the result of several high-potential sectors maturing in parallel. Builder sentiment from Accelerate highlights four areas in particular where innovation is accelerating:
Decentralized Physical Intrastructure Networks (DePIN)
Solana builders are aligning their focus around a set of emerging sectors that directly support the growth of tokenization. When asked which areas they are most bullish on, 35% of respondents pointed to DePIN. These projects involve wireless networks, distributed sensors, and edge devices that generate onchain data and enable real-world services. Builders see Solana’s low fees and high throughput as uniquely suited for supporting this category.
Since Accelerate, Solana has become the clear-cut home of DePIN, with Syndica reporting that the chain’s DePIN revenues reached a new YTD high in June—standouts Helium, Render Network, Hivemapper, UpRock, NATIX Network, and XNET collectively earned $716k.
Further strengthening its claim to dominance, Solana maintains the highest DePIN FDV in crypto, a position it took from Ethereum in early 2024.
Real-World Assets (RWA)
Another 35% of respondents selected RWAs, reflecting a conviction in Solana’s potential to bridge traditional finance and blockchain infrastructure. Builders in this category are focused on tokenizing instruments like real estate, trade finance, and treasuries to create programmable financial products. With composability, low latency, and growing developer traction, Solana offers a practical path to launch and scale these asset types onchain.
DeFi
DeFi also remains top of mind, with 17% of respondents highlighting it as an ongoing area of focus. While no longer “emerging,” DeFi continues to evolve toward more structured, institutional-grade strategies. Builders are increasingly working on products that integrate stablecoins, RWAs, and advanced yield mechanisms.
Since Accelerate, Solana DeFi protocol TVL has grown from ~$9.4B to ~$11.4B, with RockawayX portfolio standout Kamino near $3B in TVL, having become the number one Solana protocol in TVL after announcing Kamino Lend V2 at Accelerate before shuffling places again with Jupiter and Jito.
Chain Abstraction
Finally, 13% cited Chain Abstraction as a key trend. These respondents are optimistic about infrastructure that simplifies the user experience by hiding blockchain complexity and enabling intent-based interactions. In the context of tokenization, chain abstraction could be a major unlock for onboarding new users and institutions by streamlining access to diverse markets and protocols onchain.
Solana’s Next Chapter Is Operator-Led
The survey results from Accelerate and the progress since confirm what we’ve long believed at RockawayX: Solana’s future will be defined by its builders.
While macro conditions play a role, the trajectory of the ecosystem depends far more on the operators advancing infrastructure, refining developer tools, and launching products that solve real financial problems.
With major upgrades like Firedancer and DoubleZero approaching, regulatory clarity improving in key markets, and institutional interest growing around tokenized assets, the core components of Internet Capital Markets are no longer theoretical. They are being built, tested, and deployed in real time.
At RockawayX, we remain focused on supporting the founders bringing this vision to life. The foundations are in place. The momentum is real. And the opportunity to reshape capital markets onchain is only beginning. For now, Solana’s focus, along with technical improvements, should be on increasing institutional appetite for SOL, especially in the realm of DAT purchases.
It’s crunch time.
