For years, the assumption within crypto and within traditional finance was simple: when institutional adoption finally matured, Ethereum would be the chain Wall Street chose.
This is not surprising, as the network is the largest smart contract network, the default environment for developers and the ecosystem that has shaped the current idea of programmable finance.
However, as institutional tokenization efforts accelerate, a new hypothetical question has entered the mainstream discussion: what if on-chain institutions ultimately rely not on Ethereum, but on Solana?
The scenario remains speculative, but the fact that it is being taken into account reflects a shift in the way market infrastructure is now evaluated.
Solana’s evolving image
Solana’s early identity was shaped by retail speculation. Its low cost, high throughput, and ease of deployment made it the natural home for memecoins, high-speed trading, and experimental retail primitives. For much of its existence, that chaotic environment has defined the network’s cultural brand.
Yet the same features, including sub-second finality, negligible fees and high-quality duration, that fueled the speculative mania are now being reframed as the basis for institutional-level settlement.
According to Solscan, Solana can process more than 3,000 transactions per second at an average cost of half a cent facts. Ethereum, on the other hand, remains limited at the base layer and relies on rollups to scale throughput and control costs.
This performance profile has attracted the attention of analysts who follow the intersection of blockchains and traditional capital markets.
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan recently described Solana has been called “the new Wall Street,” arguing that its low-latency execution model better suits institutional workflows than general-purpose alternatives.
At the same time, stablecoin issuers and tokenization companies have amplified this narrative by building increasingly sophisticated products on the network.
Yet Solana’s ambitions remain far ahead of reality.
Today, the blockchain network averages about 284 “transactions” per second in the sense of user-initiated value movement instructions, which is well below the raw throughput it advertises.
On the other hand, Nasdaq executes roughly 2,920 trades per second and handles a daily volume of about $463 billion, compared to Solana’s roughly $6 billion.
The gap in economic density between the two platforms therefore remains significant.
However, Solana’s developers claim that upcoming upgrades will further optimize the validator’s performance, improve scheduling, and reduce blocking conflicts. These are indeed developments that can bring the network closer to the reliability profile expected of the market infrastructure.
But whether this is feasible remains uncertain; Nevertheless, the ambition signals a strategic shift, showing that Solana no longer wants to be just a fast blockchain. The network aims to be an execution engine that can support regulated financial operations at scale.
Like Galaxy research declared:
“[Solana] is now moving toward a coherent vision of “internet capital markets,” a system capable of supporting the full spectrum of digital financial activity, from retail speculation and consumer apps to enterprise-level infrastructure and tokenized real-world assets.
What will Solana be worth if Wall Street gives it a shot in 2030?
The question of what Solana could be worth if Wall Street were to meaningfully adopt it has led to the development of new modeling frameworks.
Artemis CEO Jon Ma recently published One such model, arguing that once traditional assets move up the chain, blockchains will be valued more as infrastructure than as speculative stocks.
In Ma’s framework, the value drivers are throughput capacity, cost efficiency, fee capture, and the ability to support large financial flows with low latency. Narrative dominance matters less. His model predicts that the global tokenization market will be between $10 trillion and $16 trillion by 2030.
In a scenario where Solana accounts for even 5% of that activity, it could support a market cap approaching $880 billion.
The model includes factors such as annual revenue, expected declines in inflation and blended revenue rates derived from priority fees, base fees and Jito tips.
None of these projections imply inevitability. Instead, they highlight how the market may begin to judge blockchains once real assets are moved on-chain on a large scale.
According to Rwa.xyz, tokenized RWAs are already at approximately $35.8 billion, nearly double their level as of the end of 2024. As that figure grows, performance and execution costs are becoming increasingly important in the conversation.
In this context, Solana’s appeal comes from the qualities that once defined retail culture: speed, low costs and the ability to scale without depending on external layers of execution.
Ethereum’s strengths, including security, tool maturity, and regulatory familiarity, remain the default institutional preference, but tokenization increases pressure to evaluate chains through a new lens.
