Solana Advances Internet Capital Markets with Roadmap for On-Chain Finance Infrastructure

Executive Summary

Solana is undertaking a significant strategic upgrade with its Internet Capital Markets (ICM) initiative, aiming to establish a comprehensive on-chain financial infrastructure. This initiative seeks to facilitate the full on-chain issuance, pricing, and settlement of various assets, positioning Solana as a foundational layer for future global finance. The roadmap outlines a series of technical enhancements, including new trading systems and consensus protocols. While a vibrant ecosystem of projects is emerging within this framework, the ICM market structure is still in its nascent stages, undergoing core infrastructure validation and addressing challenges related to ecosystem synergy and liquidity.

The Event in Detail

Solana's ICM initiative represents an evolution of its strategic vision, moving beyond the concept of an "on-chain NASDAQ" to create a more expansive, open, and permissionless financing and trading ecosystem. Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu champions this vision, describing Internet Capital Markets as a method to transform the internet into a value circulation layer, enabling 5.5 billion internet users to participate in capital market asset trading via blockchain technology. This approach aims to dismantle traditional financial barriers through decentralized financing methods.

The initiative is supported by a robust, multi-stage infrastructure roadmap. Key technical upgrades include:

• Block Assembly Market (BAM): Developed by Jito, BAM is a next-generation high-performance trading processing system. It provides powerful capabilities for Solana validators, traders, and applications by running on globally distributed nodes in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). BAM aims to achieve Application-Controlled Execution (ACE) and supports application-specific trading order logic through a plug-in mechanism, allowing for transparent and verifiable trade execution for Central Limit Order Books (CLOB). A testnet launch is planned for late July 2025.
• DoubleZero (DZ): This fiber-optic network is customized for Solana, designed to significantly reduce latency and increase bandwidth. It also optimizes data transmission through hardware multicast. With a testnet already involving over 100 validators, the mainnet is expected to launch by mid-September 2025.
• Alpenglow: Solana's next-generation consensus protocol is designed to reduce block finality from 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds. This protocol will also simplify design, facilitating future support for MCL and APE. It is anticipated to launch on the mainnet by the end of 2025 or early 2026. Following its deployment, transaction inclusion times are projected to fall to 50–100 milliseconds.
• Application-Controlled Execution (ACE): The ultimate goal of these infrastructure developments is ACE, which will enable smart contracts to control transaction ordering with millisecond precision, crucial for institutional-grade decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
• APE: This upgrade removes the replay mechanism from the trade landing path, further reducing latency, a long-standing priority for Solana.

Within the ICM ecosystem, several projects are contributing to its growth. MetaDAO focuses on decentralized fundraising with Futarchy governance. Believe offers a "tweet-to-token" model for simplified token issuance. Trends.fun, an "Information Capital Market," facilitates the tokenization of social media content, enabling users to create tokens for tweets with minimal cost. ICM.RUN functions as a decentralized project incubation platform. Despite these advancements, the ICM is recognized as a systemic consensus and an early-stage market structure, with its core infrastructure still undergoing validation and existing applications facing challenges in ecosystem synergy and liquidity.

Market Implications

Solana's ICM initiative seeks to fundamentally alter financial mechanics by enabling full on-chain issuance, pricing, and settlement of assets. This strategy involves building a robust infrastructure designed to support decentralized financing, thereby removing traditional barriers to capital markets. The objective is to facilitate the tokenization of a wide array of assets, from meme coins to real-world assets, and to enable global participation in capital market trading. Technical advancements, such as Anza's mission to double block space and increase Compute Unit (CU) limits to 60 million per block, are projected to achieve throughput of 100,000 transactions per second. Optimizing transaction costs through efficient CU management and account data usage is vital for improving transaction landing rates and overall network efficiency.

The Solana decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has demonstrated substantial growth, with Total Value Locked (TVL) reaching an all-time high of $7.8 billion, marking a 105% year-on-year increase. Decentralized Exchange (DEX) volumes also experienced a 100% year-on-year rise, hitting $107 billion last month. Solana's decentralized applications (dApps) garnered 57% of all dApp revenue across crypto ecosystems, generating $207 million in April. The ecosystem also boasts a $3.5 billion market cap for tokenized projects in decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), with 240,000 nodes actively participating. Liquid staking TVL on Solana has doubled year-on-year, approaching 42 million SOL.

Institutional interest is growing, with Pantera Capital committing $1.25 billion to a Solana-focused public treasury initiative aimed at tokenizing real-world assets. The deployment of the Firedancer validator client has diversified the network's codebase and increased transaction throughput by over 50%. This combination of technical innovation and institutional engagement aims to enhance the ecosystem's credibility and inject necessary liquidity. Market sentiment indicates that while high volatility is anticipated for new ICM projects and meme coins, the long-term strategic direction for Solana is viewed as bullish if the ICM initiative proves successful. However, uncertainty persists regarding the overall maturity and sustainability of the ICM market structure in the short to medium term.

Expert Commentary

Lily Liu, Chairman of the Solana Foundation, has been a key proponent of the ICM vision, describing it as foundational for building a global financial infrastructure accessible to billions of internet users. Industry observations indicate that the Solana ecosystem is "converging around a common vision: Application-Controlled Execution (ACE)," signifying a unified approach to high-performance, programmable financial transactions. While the initiative demonstrates significant potential, it is currently characterized more as a "systemic consensus" or an early-stage concept rather than a fully mature market structure.

Broader Context

Solana's strategic shift towards ICM represents an expansion of its initial goal of creating an "on-chain NASDAQ," now encompassing a broader, open, and permissionless ecosystem for diverse assets. This strategic positioning leverages Solana's high throughput and low latency to compete as a foundational infrastructure for internet capital markets, aiming to capture a significant share of institutional and real-time finance markets.

However, the nascent ICM environment faces several structural risks. A notable challenge is the lack of product-market fit for many tokens, which often function as speculative assets rather than possessing inherent utility or demand. This leads to speculation over substance, where retail investors are driven by hype cycles rather than fundamental business analyses. The incentive structure within some ICM projects, where builders earn transaction fees immediately, can foster short-termism and limit motivation for long-term value creation. Furthermore, a lack of legal protection exists for many ICM tokens, as they are often not classified as equity and lack regulatory oversight. This contributes to low user stickiness, as tokens may experience rapid price fluctuations. As Solana's adoption accelerates, it also faces increasing regulatory scrutiny. The establishment of the Solana Policy Institute demonstrates a proactive approach to engaging with regulatory frameworks, which is critical for encouraging broader institutional participation and ensuring long-term viability. Nonetheless, Solana's combination of institutional partnerships, technical innovation, and a unified ecosystem strategy may prove to be a defining advantage in the next era of decentralized infrastructure.