EN | How Institutions Are Using Solana to Distribute and Optimize Financial Services | MERGE SP

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. How's going? My name is Pedro Marafióti. People call me Kuka in crypto.

Have this nickname stuff. I'm the lead for Superteam Brazil. Superteam is like the official program from the Solana Foundation to support startups and institutions all over the world. Today, Superteam already operates in more than 20 countries. Today, I'm going to talk about how institutions are using Solana to optimize and distribute right financial services.

To start, we need to understand a little bit of the the mindset, let's say, and the philosophy behind the Solana network. And it's pretty simple. It's to have one network for all the assets available like like stocks, tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds, tokenized equities, everything in one chain from all markets, from the US, from Brazil, from Mexico, everything unified in one single chain. I'll just go over quickly about some numbers here on how Solana is performing. These are numbers from last year and 2 years ago, so 24 months.

Solana is the number one in developer growth, so the community is growing very rapidly. Solana is number one as well in app revenue, so the apps in Solana are making more money than basically all other chains. The number one in new assets generated. And the number one in the most important in trading volume, okay? Solana is already dominating the internet capital markets.

This presentation, I'm just going to talk about um the past and what's happening right now. I'm not going to give anything about the future. I'm not going to make any promise. I'm not going to give any roadmap. So, everything that I'm going to speak today is related on what's going on today in Solana.

Just to put in perspective, this is from last week. In one single day, 24 hours, Solana network made more revenue on on chain with fees than all other 30-plus chains combined. So, Solana made $700,000 in fees in one day, 24 hours, while 30-plus other big chains combined generated $672,000 in fees. So, this can we already can see the sum of the big difference. Just to dig deeper, in one day in 2025, sorry, we had 30 billion um 30 billion transactions in 2025 with an average of 70 million active wallets.

So, active wallets can be bots and regular users, but Solana by itself has more wallets active every month than any other chain combined and more transactions than any other chain as well. Just as well, still on the numbers. Oh, sorry. Still on the numbers. In during 2025, we had 15 billion dollars in stablecoins in Solana.

Today, we already have more than 16 billion dollars in stablecoins. We we we generated more than 2.4 billion dollars in revenue for applications that runs on Solana like Pump Fun, Meteora, Jupiter, and many others. We had more than 12 million assets created on Solana during 2025. And the most important, 1.

5 trillion dollars traded on chain. Just to give some perspective as well on the technology side of things and the speed. Solana operates with more than 1,000 transactions per second. This is not future, it's like literally right now, it's happening. More than 1,000 transactions per second.

And this can go up to almost 100,000 already. Nowadays. The finalization and confirmation time is 400 milliseconds. And it cost costs basically none for the user to to use the chain. It's basically free, right?

When you compare that to Ethereum, for example, with 14 transactions per second, 3 minutes to fully finalize a transaction, and 25 cents to pay per transaction on average, you can see why institutions are migrating from Ethereum and other chains toward Solana. As I mentioned, Solana is already dominating the internet capital markets. And when we talk about internet capital markets, I'm talking about tokenized equities, tokenized bonds, cross-border payments, stablecoins, which was the the last topic here in the conversation, FX settlement, and much more. So, let me just give it a quick jump here before we go deeper into those numbers. Just to give a perspective as well how the TradFi world sees Solana.

Right now, Solana's ETF have more than 1 billion dollars in assets uh in assets. We can see from like the big guys like Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, 21Shares, and many more. And then we have that as well on on the other side that already hold more than 3 billion dollars in Solana. So, several companies that hold Solanas Solanas like the token SOL on their treasury. Now, jumping on on chain activity.

As you guys can see here in the screen, most of the big names or the biggest players in the market, they use Solana for something. We just had Visa on the stage. Visa uses Solana to settle millions and millions in USDC on Solana. JPMorgan, for example, did it this year, issued commercial paper insurance of 50 million USD. They did it on Solana.

Franklin Templeton, which I'll go deeper as well in this presentation, they have several products running on Solana. This is a more than a trillion dollar, right, asset manager. And they operate on Solana. Western Union, they just they're going to release their stablecoin and they're going to pass big part of their operations on chain and they chose Solana exclusively. Fiserv, they have their stablecoin running on Solana helping financial institutions.

BlackRock, the big the biggest of the biggest, they run on Solana their tokenized fund, right, build. They have around 550 million dollars on Solana. PayPal chose Solana to be the default network for their their stablecoin called PYUSD. And then we have Apollo as well, which is the biggest private credit running a fund a tokenized fund on Solana, Ecred. So, this is a CEO of Franklin Templeton, again, an asset manager with more than a trillion dollars, right, in custody.

Jenny Johnson, and she said, "Solana is one of the first institutionally focused chains." And when she says that, it's not because she's trying to do marketing or just saying out out something weird, it's because they have true conviction in Solana. That's why Franklin Templeton has so many products on Solana. One of them being Benji, right? The first US registered money market fund that runs on Solana.

So, before this type of product would be mainly for the wealthy in the Americas, would be a very difficult financial product for somebody to have access. Nowadays, anyone using Solana can easily have access to this and is brought by Franklin Templeton. Another very big example on how institutions are choosing Solana and using Solana is State Street that just did a in partnership with Galaxy, a tokenized liquid fund on Solana. State Street is huge, right? Is the one of the backbones of financial of finance at all.

They have if you count their technology and who uses their technology, they have they operate with more than 50 trillion dollars. And they didn't create a technology for this. They didn't chose any other chains. They chose Solana first thing. On the other side here as well, we have a stocks 24/7, so anyone can operate any stock on the the American stocks using Solana.

Kraken and Backed Fi created tokenized equities and they're operating on Solana. They they started last year in June, yeah, June of last year. And they already have more than 25 billion dollars in volume. So, imagine you're here in Brazil, but something happens, you can easily go on chain and trade the the Nike stock at 3:00 a.m.

in the morning. So, it's uh bringing the markets 24/7 for anyone in the world. On the institutional side, the adoption doesn't stop growing. We have products like Ecred, which I spoke, which is from Apollo, USDY, and many others that already have more than 1 billion dollar totalizing in RWAs in Solana. And the the leading product actually is US Treasuries that are tokenized on Solana with more than 300 million already.

For example, JPMorgan here, Solana is fast becoming the settlement rail for Wall Street. This is JPMorgan just did it. They arranged they created and distributed short-term bond with Galaxy Digital using Solana. This was this year, 2026. And here we have a phrase from a quote from Scott Lucas, the head of marketing digital assets.

"This trade demonstrates institutional appetite for digital assets and our capability to secure bringing instrument instruments on chain using Solana." So, JPMorgan is not using many other chains. They're mainly focusing on on Solana to distribute those type of financial products between institutions. We already went over basically all of this. Just to go quickly, we have BlackRock with the fund with more than 500 million.

We have Franklin Templeton with a bunch of products on Solana. We have State Street. And now, just last month, Goldman Sachs bought more than 100 million dollars on SOL as investments. The last the last panel here, they were talking a lot about stablecoins. And stablecoins, I think is the are the gateway, right?

So, Solana is powering stablecoins as well. We have basically all the major players on the stablecoin game. As I mentioned, Visa, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Paxos, Fiserv, BlackRock, etc. And just putting into perspective, here's some numbers. Solana already have more than 16 billion dollars on a stablecoin supply running.

More than 9 million holders using that. This is from last month and it was the all-time high already. And almost 1 trillion, 972 billion dollars on stablecoins traded on chain. And this is not of 2025, this is about February. So, in 1 month, Solana network handled more than $1 trillion or almost $1 million or $1 trillion in traded the stable coins, okay?

On the market, it already operates almost 50% of the market of stable coins and when we talk about transfer and volume on stable coins, and it's growing very quickly. Year over year, we almost reached 800%. Some other players that are using stable coins, we have Wordline that allow their merchants now to accept US DG, which is another stable coin using Solana network. Fize that is connected now to all their clients as well offering the FIUSD. And then Visa that I mentioned before that already settles a lot of millions and millions, a lot of money using USDC on Solana.

The the latest one, the newest one was Western Union that just this came up a month ago, I believe. They just announced that they will be using Solana exclusively for their operations and releasing their stable coin USDPT. So, this is a company that operates for almost 200 years and that already operates, I think 150 to 200 billion dollars per year. And they chose Solana. They didn't pick any other chain, they didn't create their own technology, they chose Solana to operate.

Here is a phrase from their CEO, "We look at alternatives and came to the conclusion that for an institutional use case, Solana was the right choice. Not one of the choices, but the right choice." Another example of a company using Solana as default is PayPal that has the PYUSD, their stable coin, and they operate with Solana as their default network. PayPal, everybody knows as well, more than 400 million customers, more than 140 or 100 billion per month in volume, and they're going to use Solana, they're already using Solana with their stable coin. And this opens many doors as well because a lot of people or a lot of customers from PayPal, for example, YouTube, now allow their users and their clients, creators to receive their payments, right, their salaries on Solana using PYUSD.

So, now if you're a YouTuber, you can go there instead of going receiving in your bank and taking 3 days, you can receive instantly on Solana using PYUSD. On the There we go. Sorry. On the on more the retail side, many banks are already offering Solana, the token SOL to be purchased directly on their account. SoFi, it's a it's a bank in the US, very popular with the youngsters and stuff.

They you can go directly there in your checking account and buy SOL. Here in Brazil, we have Nubank, I think everybody knows about Nubank. You can go there and buy SOL. So, it's getting very very popular as well in between retail. Venmo, for the Americans, everybody use Venmo there in the US.

You can transfer the Solana tokens using Venmo, it's fully integrated. So, I think I covered most of the use cases. I had not a lot of time. So, we can see that institutions, big institutions use Solana with their clients, so institution institution institution and and end users like YouTube. And all of those institutions that I spoke here today, they chose Solana mainly because of the philosophy behind Solana and because of our values, right?

So, what are the major Solana values? Just to go over quickly as well. Distributions over grants. We want you products to be a well distributed. We just don't want to we just don't want to start giving money away.

We want we want to make it the right choices to the right people. Products over in narratives. Narratives are pretty good, but narratives come and die, right? And good products, they come and they stay. So, Solana always double down on good products.

High performance over high philosophy. Unfortunately, in crypto, we have a lot of philosophy that goes on and on in between chains. Solana is here as a business model here to be the backbone of of finance and we we we we love to be the highest performance chain. Unify liquidity over fragmentation. This is a little bit obvious, but instead of having thousands of L2s and having liquidity everywhere, so the operators and the capital allocators don't know where to operate, you put everything together in one single chain that can operate.

And the most important one and the last one there, revenue for apps. Most a lot of chains, they prioritize making revenue for the network with network fees and stuff like that. Solana really doesn't care and even though she doesn't care, she was the one that made most, right, than the three plus combined. What Solana cares is to help business to make money. So, if you want to if you have your business, you're an entrepreneur, you're a small guy, a startup, or if you're an institution, you should come to Solana.

Those are the major values. So, there is a quick phrase there, choose your network wisely, and that's why those big guys, they use Solana. To finalize, I have these two links here. They are very nice. If anyone wants to dig a little bit deeper, payments.

org is a website made Solana Foundation that covers most of the payment solutions that and and who uses Solana. So, you're going to see a little bit more in depth everything that I spoke here about payments. We have all the details there. And whysolana.com is a report by Rockaway that goes very deep into all their theses on why Solana is winning.

Thanks, everybody. I'll be around the event if anybody wants to ask questions. This is my Telegram, it's Kukasolana, and thank you guys very much. Thank you.