The complete guide to Solana for financial institutions

BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have deployed tokenized funds on Solana. Banks like HSBC and Bank of America are tokenizing securities through R3's Corda integration, and Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot on the network. In early 2026, the SEC classified SOL as a digital commodity, clearing a significant regulatory hurdle.

The capital flows reflect the momentum on Solana: $1.72 billion into Solana treasuries in Q3 2025 alone, $700 million+ in ETF inflows, and CME's SOL futures hitting $2.1 billion in open interest — the fastest any contract in CME history doubled past the $1 billion mark.

The institutional interest is well-established. In this guide, we break down why financial institutions are choosing Solana, what the infrastructure requirements look like in practice, why the challenge extends beyond any single network, and how to evaluate providers when your institution is building across Solana and EVM chains simultaneously.

Why Solana is attracting institutional capital

The institutional case for Solana comes down to technical attributes that align with financial use cases.

The network processes high transaction volumes with sub-second confirmations and a median fee of $0.00025 — cost economics suited to high-frequency settlement, stablecoin transfers, and micropayment rails. The Firedancer validator client has demonstrated throughput of 1 million TPS in testing, with the Alpenglow consensus upgrade targeting sub-150ms latency.

The R3-Corda integration is particularly notable as it provides banks with a hybrid architecture where Corda's permissioned layer handles compliance and privacy while Solana's public layer provides speed, composability, and open settlement. R3's Corda currently secures over $10 billion in tokenized regulated assets for institutions including HSBC, Bank of America, and Euroclear — and this integration allows those assets to flow onto Solana without requiring institutions to rebuild their compliance frameworks.

The ecosystem has reached meaningful depth. Solana's stablecoin supply hit $15.58 billion in February 2026, with USDC transfer volume up 300% year-over-year. Thirteen publicly traded companies hold 1.44% of total SOL supply, and staking yields of 7–8% have drawn corporate treasurers treating SOL as a productive fixed-income position. There's sufficient liquidity, tooling, and institutional counterparty presence for production deployments.

But institutions don't build on one chain

The same financial institutions deploying on Solana are also building on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon — and this is the part that gets underweighted in most Solana-specific conversations.

Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund — the BENJI token — is distributed across Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Stellar. Aave, the largest onchain lending platform at $40B+ in TVL, operates primarily on Ethereum. Morpho has captured $10B+ in TVL with institutional partnerships like Apollo Global Management, largely on Ethereum and Base. Tokenized Treasuries are issued across Ethereum, Stellar, Avalanche, and Solana.

For institutional treasury teams and asset managers, the yield landscape and product distribution span a dozen networks. The operational reality is multi-chain.

This creates a compounding operational problem. Every additional chain introduces a different dashboard, different APIs, different node providers, different failure modes, and different vendor relationships. A treasury team deploying stablecoins into Aave on Ethereum, Kamino on Solana, and tokenized Treasuries across multiple networks isn't just managing capital allocation — they're managing infrastructure sprawl. Each chain adds procurement cycles, security reviews, and integration work that pulls engineering resources away from the financial product itself.

When blockchain infrastructure is treated as a per-chain vendor decision, the result is fragmented operations, inconsistent reliability, and vendor management overhead that scales linearly with every network added.

Solana and EVM chains are fundamentally different infrastructure problems

Solana and EVM-based chains (Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon) are architecturally different at a deep level. Solana uses a proof-of-history consensus mechanism, a different account model, different transaction structures, and different data storage patterns. The RPC methods, the way archival data is indexed, the approach to streaming real-time updates — none of it maps cleanly from one architecture to the other.

In practice, this means a provider that built strong Ethereum infrastructure can't repurpose it for Solana and expect institutional-grade results. Archival queries that return in milliseconds on a well-optimized EVM stack can take seconds on a Solana deployment that wasn't purpose-built. Heavy methods like getProgramAccounts — used by asset managers to scan holdings across thousands of wallets — require Solana-specific optimization that generic infrastructure doesn't provide. The reverse is also true. Solana-native providers that deliver strong performance on that network often have limited or no coverage across EVM chains.

For institutions building across both ecosystems — which is the majority of those deploying meaningful capital onchain — this creates a difficult tradeoff: stitch together multiple specialized providers and absorb the operational complexity, or use a generalist that underperforms on each individual chain.

How to evaluate an infrastructure provider

Given the architectural differences between Solana and EVM chains, and the operational cost of managing multiple vendors, the infrastructure decision is one of the highest-leverage choices an institution makes when building onchain. Here's what to evaluate.

Chain-specific performance, not just chain support. Many providers list Solana on their website but run it on generic infrastructure. Ask for benchmarks on archival data retrieval, heavy methods like getProgramAccounts, and streaming latency. The difference between purpose-built Solana infrastructure and a repurposed EVM stack is measurable — often by an order of magnitude.

Reliability under stress. Uptime during normal conditions is table stakes. What matters is performance during market volatility, network congestion, and third-party outages. Ask how the provider performs under pressure historically. A great pressure test for providers was the $19 billion liquidation event in October 2025.

Compliance and procurement readiness. Before engineering evaluates performance, legal and compliance teams need to approve the vendor. That means asking whether the provider holds SOC 2 Type II certification, whether they can complete your security questionnaire, and whether their audit trail and data handling practices meet your regulatory obligations.

Multi-chain coverage from a single vendor. Every additional provider adds a procurement cycle, a security review, a separate SLA, and an integration to maintain. A provider that delivers institutional-grade performance across both Solana and EVM chains from a single platform reduces operational overhead significantly.

For a deeper framework, see our enterprise RPC evaluation guide.

The integration path

The typical path from evaluation to production follows a consistent pattern, regardless of which chains an institution is deploying on.

Connect and validate. Integrate your systems with blockchain infrastructure via RPC — this is how your applications read onchain data (balances, rates, protocol health) and submit transactions. At this stage, the goal is confirming that queries return accurately and transactions land reliably across every target network before capital is at risk.

Run a controlled pilot. Deploy a small allocation through the full operational workflow — a deposit into a lending protocol or tokenized Treasury product, yield monitoring via RPC queries, a withdrawal, and reconciliation back into your accounting systems.

Scale across chains. Once the infrastructure is validated, expanding to additional networks or strategies becomes incremental rather than a new integration project. Your RPC connections, monitoring, and compliance tooling carry over.

Most enterprise teams move from initial integration to live deployment within 90 days.

What Alchemy provides

Alchemy provides blockchain infrastructure for companies like Coinbase, Robinhood, Visa, Circle, and Stripe. The multi-chain coverage spans 100+ networks, with purpose-built infrastructure for each major ecosystem rather than a single architecture applied across all of them.

On Solana, this means purpose-built infrastructure, engineered with a dedicated team of Solana-specialized engineers, brought in through strategic acquisitions — delivering up to 20x faster archival data retrieval, up to 10x faster heavy computational methods, gRPC streaming at half the cost of other providers.

The platform is consistent across all supported networks: SOC 2 Type II certification, multi-region architecture with 3–5 layers of autonomous failover, and 99.99% uptime — maintained through massive volume or market volatility. For an institution building on Solana, Ethereum, and Base, this means one infrastructure partner, one security review, one procurement cycle, and one SLA — with purpose-built performance on each network.

We're here to help financial institutions operate at scale reliably on any chain.

Learn more about Alchemy's Solana offering, and contact us to design a pilot, explore custom pricing, or answer integration questions.