Solana: Internet Capital Markets

1. Latest Roadmap for the Internet Capital Markets Mission 1.1 ICM & ACE Solana’s ultimate goal is to build a decentralized foundation for “Internet Capital Markets,” bringing global capital markets on-chain and deeply connecting traditional and crypto finance. The Solana ecosystem is focused on “Application-Controlled Execution” (ACE), aiming to let smart contracts control transaction ordering with millisecond precision. This boosts flexibility and innovation, making Solana a platform for both mass adoption and bold market experiments. 1.2 Microstructure Trade-Offs Privacy vs Transparency: Hiding large orders protects market makers but reduces transparency; early broadcasting helps better fills. Rate Limits vs No Limits: Rate-limiting takers can boost real liquidity but may slow trading and price discovery. Inclusion vs Finality vs Latency: Targeting 50–100ms transaction latency to cut risk and improve efficiency. Local vs Global: Multi-leader (MCL) and edge execution boost global sync and resilience. Market Maker vs Taker Priority: Devs will soon customize order flow and rate limits to fit different markets. Retail vs Institutions: Solana supports custom apps for both, allowing them to coexist. Hybrid vs Fully On-Chain: The goal is full on-chain markets, not just a settlement layer for CEXs.

2. Solana Recent Data Trends 2.1 Longitudinal Active Addresses: In 2025, Solana’s daily active address peak reached 5M+, up over 30% from June 2024, gradually returning to bull market highs. Volume & TPS: Daily on-chain transactions exceed 50M, with peak TPS stable above 4,000. TVL: July 2025 TVL surpassed $10B again, up nearly 170% from early 2024, as DeFi recovery and RWA projects continue to drive capital inflows. Dev Activity: As of July 2025, Solana has over 3,200 active developers, up nearly 30% from 2024, with new GitHub projects and commits ranking among the top public chains. 2.2 Cross-Chain Comparison Performance & Cost: Fees stay at $0.0001–0.0005/tx, much lower than Ethereum ($0.5–5), BNB Chain, and Polygon. TPS and throughput still lead the space. User Growth: H1 2025, Solana’s user growth is #1 among major chains, outpacing Ethereum and L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism. TVL Ranking: Solana is #3 on TVL, only behind Ethereum and Tron, surpassing the BNB Chain. TVL grows fastest among top chains. Solana’s key stats all saw strong rebounds in 2025, thanks to ecosystem innovation and mainnet upgrades. The chain leads to user and TVL growth, especially in DePIN and RWA.

3. Future Outlook 3.1 Tech Roadmap Short-term (1–3 months) Jito BAM: Next-gen trading engine, testnet live July 2025, running on TEE-powered distributed nodes. Partners include Drift, Pyth, Dflow—moving closer to ACE. Anza Upgrades: Agave 2.3 brings new TPU clients, much lower latency, QUIC fixes. Market makers see 95th percentile latency at 0 slot—super reliable. Mid-term (3–9 months) DoubleZero (DZ): Custom fiber network, boosts bandwidth and cuts latency. 100+ validators and 3% of mainnet stake are already on testnet; mainnet launch expected Sept 2025. Alpenglow Consensus: New protocol drops block finality from 12.8s to ~150ms, simplifies design, preps for MCL/APE. Mainnet ETA: end of 2025. Async Program Execution (APE): Removes tx replay, cuts latency further. Proposals (SIMD 192, 290, 297) to roll out after Alpenglow. Long-term (2027) MCL & Protocol-level ACE: Multiple leaders produce blocks at once, lowering censorship risk and syncing global info. Apps can fully control order logic (like cancel-priority, rate-limiting), making smart contracts the backbone of on-chain finance. MCL enables real-time collaboration across markets like NY and Tokyo, boosting global competitiveness.

3.2 Use Cases RWA asset explosion Ondo has issued the on-chain US Treasury fund OUSG on Solana, with circulation exceeding $300 million in Q2 2025, becoming the absolute leader in the RWA sector. Maple provides on-chain credit for crypto-native and traditional institutions via Solana, with total loans exceeding $200 million by 2025, and promotes broad USDC usage in RWA settlements. New projects like Superstate and Backed have brought multiple types of real assets such as corporate bonds and real estate funds onto Solana in 2025, with both the variety and total amount of on-chain RWA assets reaching new highs. DePIN and AI Helium’s global hotspot nodes surpass 1 million, with Solana-based on-chain data rewards and management system further improved, supporting more IoT and AI data scenarios. Render has over 20,000 compute nodes serving on Solana mainnet in 2025, daily on-chain AI rendering and inference tasks up 150% year-on-year, in cooperation with many AI unicorns. Hivemapper’s global map collection nodes exceed 80,000, with on-chain data uploading, incentives, and trading becoming more mature, making it a key infrastructure for the map data market. Nosana has doubled the number of AI training enterprise clients, with daily active users for on-chain compute bidding and settlement exceeding 10,000, becoming a new paradigm for AI data and compute flow. Solana Saga 2 phone global sales surpass 200,000 units,the on-chain wallet activation rate exceeds 80%, becoming the preferred smart terminal for Web3-native users. Payments and Stablecoins Visa has launched Solana stablecoin settlement networks in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, supporting USDC, PYUSD, and other multi-currencies, with monthly settlement volume exceeding $2 billion. Solana Pay has partnered with Shopify, https://t.co/7TjGUu2hWF, and other platforms, with global merchant access surpassing 100,000, and daily on-chain payment transactions exceeding 1 million. USDC’s on-chain circulation on Solana exceeds $5 billion in 2025, becoming the core asset for DeFi, RWA, and payments in the Solana ecosystem. Phantom’s on-chain payment users surpass 5 million in 2025, supporting QR code payments in USDC, SOL, and other currencies, with a payment experience comparable to traditional mobile payments. High-performance finance Firedancer goes live on the mainnet in 2025, with actual test TPS peak exceeding 1.5 million, supporting high-frequency trading, complex derivatives, and on-chain market making, becoming the innovation base for on-chain finance. Zeta Markets’ daily on-chain options and perpetual contracts trading volume exceeds $200 million in 2025, with user count up 200% year-on-year, becoming the leading high-performance derivatives platform in the Solana ecosystem. Drift Protocol, after its 2025 upgrade, sees on-chain CLOB daily matching latency drop to 50 milliseconds, liquidity pool size surpassing $500 million, with its innovative rate limit and ordering mechanism adopted by many projects. Web2 giants Shopify: Over 30,000 merchants worldwide support Solana Pay in 2025, with on-chain order and payment data seamlessly integrated with traditional ERP systems. Google Cloud: Solana node deployments grow 120% year-on-year in 2025, providing highly reliable data services and compliance solutions for global enterprises. Telegram: Solana on-chain asset transfer feature goes live in 2025, with monthly active transfer users exceeding 1 million.