Wall Street Bets on Solana: A Comprehensive Layout from ARK to Corporate Treasuries

Author: cole

In the world of cryptocurrency, the flow of capital is always the most honest language. While retail investors are still going crazy for the next hundredfold MeMe coin, a deeper and more powerful capital undercurrent is quietly changing the landscape of the market. This force comes from the top investment institutions on Wall Street — the "smart money" that manages trillions in funds and is known for its calmness and rationality.

And their new favorite is Solana (SOL).

This is not just another cliché of "Ethereum killer", nor is it a fleeting speculative frenzy. This is a carefully planned strategic rotation, a deliberate asset reallocation by institutional investors as the crypto market matures.

01 Four Strong Evidence of Institutional Entry

The most compelling way to prove the occurrence of a capital rotation is to demonstrate the flow of real money:

1) The ETP fund continues to "attract capital," with net inflows lasting for 21 weeks.

According to a report released by the authoritative digital asset management company CoinShares in September 2025, investment products focused on Solana have recorded net inflows for 21 consecutive weeks. Year-to-date, the cumulative net inflow of these products has reached as high as $1.16 billion. For an emerging high-growth asset, this sustained buying pressure over several months is the strongest evidence that institutional investors remain optimistic in the long term.

This "capital-absorbing" ability is global in nature. In Canada, the Solana Staking ETF (ticker: SOLQ) issued by 3iQ has surpassed 300 million CAD in assets under management (AUM), becoming a leader in the market. In Europe, well-known issuers like VanEck and 21Shares have also laid out various Solana ETP products, some of which even include staking yield features, providing institutions with a convenient way to obtain passive income.

2) ARK Invest's proactive approach, publicly adjusting their positions.

If the continuous inflow of ETPs represents the general sentiment of the market, then the public adjustments of top actively managed funds reveal the strategic intentions of cutting-edge investors.

In April 2025, the funds under ARK are systematically selling off their holdings in Bitcoin ETF shares, instead making large purchases of Canada's 3iQ Solana Staking ETF (SOLQ). In just two trading days, ARK has invested over $10 million, acquiring nearly 1 million shares of SOLQ.

This is by no means a simple asset rebalancing, but an active decision based on clear investment logic. ARK not only sees the growth potential of Solana but also values its ability to generate staking yields, its “income-generating” property. Furthermore, ARK has entrusted its Solana validator business to SOL Strategies, a professional firm with a publicly listed company background, which indicates that it is deeply involved in the actual operations of maintaining the security and stable operation of the Solana network, rather than being just a passive financial investor.

3) The rise of "Solana version of MicroStrategy", a new narrative for corporate treasury.

Do you remember how MicroStrategy pioneered the "corporate treasury Bitcoinization" by continuously buying and holding Bitcoin? Today, the same story is unfolding on Solana.

In September 2025, publicly traded company Forward Industries announced a SOL investment plan of up to $1.6 billion as part of its strategic treasury diversification, and this plan has the support of top crypto venture capital firms such as Multicoin Capital, Galaxy Digital, and Jump Crypto.

These companies not only buy SOL but also generate profits through staking, effectively locking a large number of tokens out of the circulating market. On-chain data shows that as of September 2025, at least 17 institutional entities collectively hold over 11.73 million SOL, with a total value of 2.9 billion dollars, accounting for nearly 2.04% of the circulating supply.

4) The final countdown before the US spot ETF takes the last step to explode.

If the above evidence represents the vanguard of "smart money", then the approval of the US spot Solana ETF will be the "all-out signal" to open the floodgates of mainstream Wall Street capital.

Currently, Wall Street giants including VanEck, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, and Grayscale have submitted applications for a spot Solana ETF to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Although the SEC has repeatedly delayed its decision, market analysts generally predict a high likelihood of approval before the end of 2025.

The strong expectations surrounding this event have begun to influence market behavior. Even after the news broke that the SEC would delay its decision, the price of SOL still demonstrated strong resilience, indicating that investors are confident in the eventual outcome.

These four pieces of evidence are interlinked and together paint a clear picture: institutional capital is systematically and continuously flowing into the Solana ecosystem through various channels such as ETPs, actively managed funds, and corporate treasury.

Once the "shoe" of the US spot ETF drops, this capital feast will officially reach its climax.

02 Why Solana?

The flow of capital is never without reason. The reason Wall Street's "smart money" chooses Solana is because it demonstrates unique and irreplaceable advantages in terms of technical architecture, ecological vitality, and market trends.

Advantage 1: Performance Monster - Ultimate Experience of Monolithic Architecture

Imagine a superhighway with a constant flow of traffic and 65 lanes, compared to a city road network that requires passing through countless toll booths and interchanges to connect. This is the fundamental difference in architecture between Solana and many other blockchains.

Solana adopts a "monolithic" architecture, aiming to achieve extreme speed and throughput on a single blockchain layer. It achieves parallel processing of transactions through its unique "Proof of History" consensus mechanism, similar to that of a multi-lane superhighway. This has resulted in astonishing performance data:

• Ultra High Throughput: The theoretical peak exceeds 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), with stable daily operation in the range of 3,000-5,000 TPS.
• Lightning-fast speed: The final confirmation time for transactions is less than 3 seconds, almost instantaneously.
• Extremely low cost: The average fee per transaction is only about $0.00025, cheap enough to be negligible.

For application scenarios that require handling massive, high-frequency, low-value transactions—such as payments, gaming, social networking, and the Internet of Things—Solana's architecture offers an unparalleled experience for users and developers. As noted in a report by Grayscale Research, Solana achieves high performance on a single layer, avoiding the "liquidity fragmentation and more cumbersome user experiences" that come with other multi-layer solutions. This simplicity and efficiency in architecture is the technical cornerstone of its appeal.

Advantage 2: Ecological Attraction - Seizing Three Major High-Growth Tracks

If outstanding performance is the "hardware" of Solana, then the thriving ecosystem applications are its "software." Solana has established an absolute leadership position in three emerging tracks with significant growth potential, thanks to its technological advantages.

1) DePIN

DePIN is hailed as the next trillion-dollar track, aiming to incentivize users to co-build and share real-world infrastructure through blockchain (such as wireless networks, map data, energy networks, etc.). Such applications require processing millions of micropayments, with extremely stringent demands on network performance and costs. Solana is one of the few public chains capable of meeting this requirement. Therefore, leading projects in this field, such as Helium (decentralized 5G network), Hivemapper (decentralized maps), and Render (decentralized GPU rendering), have migrated to or are directly built on Solana, collectively creating over $10 billion in market value.

2）DeFi

Decentralized exchanges (DEX) on Solana demonstrate astonishing capital efficiency. Data shows that from the end of 2024 to the beginning of 2025, DEX trading volume on Solana often accounts for a significant majority of the global total, sometimes even exceeding 80%. This means that every dollar locked in the Solana DeFi ecosystem generates more economic activity than on other chains, which is a key indicator of the health and vitality of a financial ecosystem.

Although the vast majority of trading volume is contributed by MeMe, it cannot be denied that there is an active force on the Solana chain during the MeMe super cycle.

3. Payment

When traditional financial giants choose a blockchain to build their future payment networks, it itself is a strong endorsement. The two giants in the payment field - Visa and PayPal - have chosen to launch their stablecoin and payment projects on Solana precisely because of its advantages in processing large-scale transactions with speed and low cost.

03 The Investment Logic of Wall Street: The Valuation Art of Solana

After understanding the technical and ecological advantages of Solana, we also need to look at how investors assess the value of Solana and incorporate it into their portfolios.

1) The temptation of a high Beta value

For institutional investors seeking excess returns, one of the most attractive quantitative arguments for Solana is its relatively small market capitalization. As of the third quarter of 2025, Solana's market capitalization is approximately $119.4 billion, while Bitcoin's is as high as $2.2 trillion.

Matt Hougan, the Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise, proposed an interesting theory of "capital amplification": Due to this massive scale difference, the impact of the same amount of capital flowing in on the price of Solana will far exceed that on Bitcoin. He calculated that a $1.6 billion purchase of SOL could have a market impact equivalent to a $33 billion purchase of BTC.

This means that Solana is an asset with a high Beta value. In a bull market, when the entire crypto market is boosted by inflows of capital, allocating a portion of Solana positions is expected to yield returns far exceeding the market average. This is highly attractive for performance-driven fund managers.

2) The appeal of "interest-bearing assets"

In a global macro environment of low or even negative interest rates, "yield-bearing assets" that can generate stable cash flows are highly sought after. Solana, through its Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism, offers holders an attractive staking yield.

Currently, the native staking annualized yield of Solana is approximately 7.16%. This means that for institutions holding SOL for the long term, in addition to the potential for capital appreciation, they can also receive a substantial income in the form of "interest" denominated in SOL. This is a key reason why ARK Invest chose to buy the SOLQ ETF with staking functionality, rather than a regular ETF. This dual attribute of "asset + yield" greatly enhances Solana's appeal as a long-term investment target.

3) "The Nasdaq of Digital Assets"

Wall Street likes simple, clear stories with room for imagination. Solana happens to provide a perfect narrative: it is neither trying to become the 'gold' of the digital world (like Bitcoin), nor is it trying to be the 'settlement layer' of global finance, but rather aims to be the 'Nasdaq' of on-chain consumption economy.

This positioning is very precise. Nasdaq is a hub for high-tech, high-growth companies around the world. Solana, with its high performance, low cost, and excellent user experience, is becoming the preferred platform for all consumer-facing, high-frequency interactive on-chain applications (such as gaming, social networking, payments, and DePIN). This story tells investors that investing in Solana is investing in the gateway for the next billion users entering Web3, and it is investing in the future of the entire on-chain consumption economy.

4) "Made in America" label

In an era that increasingly emphasizes technological sovereignty and supply chain security, the "nationality" of a project has also begun to become a consideration for institutions. Solana has a potential advantage in this regard that has not yet been fully recognized by the market: it is a "Made in America" blockchain.

Solana Labs is a company based in the United States, founded by top engineers from Qualcomm. Its ecosystem has close relationships with top US VCs (such as Multicoin, Jump, Galaxy) and institutions. As the new US government shows an increasingly pro-crypto stance and emphasizes keeping technological innovation domestic, Solana's "native" identity may bring unexpected regulatory and political tailwinds. This is undoubtedly an important advantage for institutional capital seeking long-term certainty.

04 Summary

The rotation of institutional capital towards Solana not only changes Solana's own fate but is also profoundly impacting the future landscape of the entire cryptocurrency market.

Of course, the road to the future is not smooth sailing. Solana also faces its own challenges. Although its network stability has maintained continuous normal operation for over 15 months since early 2024, the sporadic outages in the past still remain a thorn in the hearts of investors. Furthermore, its higher hardware requirements for validators have led to ongoing discussions about the degree of network centralization.

However, from the actions on Wall Street, it seems that these risks have already been factored into the pricing. What they see is an ecosystem that is continuously iterating and becoming stronger in adversity, a future giant that has already found a clear product-market fit and is being systematically positioned by "smart money."

The conclusion is simple: When Wall Street starts to take it seriously, the rules of the game change. And this time, they have their eyes on Solana.