The collaboration sees Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, join R3’s board of directors. R3 has the world’s largest collection of permissioned RWA networks, with over $10 billion in regulated assets on-chain across its platforms and now brings this to Solana.

Adds Rutter, “Yes, we can tokenize and move securities instantly, but tokenized cash doesn’t exist yet in TradFi. So, by merging these worlds, it opens up a plethora of opportunities for both sides, both the DeFi and the TradFi players.”

Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink co-founder commented “Your ability to own certain equities, commodities, funds on chain will allow you to manage risk in a different way. It’ll allow you to use them as collateral. It’ll allow you to get yield from them in different ways. And you’ll actually see a kind of explosion of innovative financial products that would have historically been built by banks or asset managers, but now can be built by startups like the ones at this conference.”

Former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo predicted that within a decade, significant securities offerings would be tokenized on-chain stating, “There won’t be a security offering, debt offering, equities offering of any significance that is not tokenized onchain.”

Solana was conceived by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, in 2017 and Solana mainnet beta launched in 2020 featuring basic smart contract support and Proof of History (PoH) integrated with Proof of Stake (PoS).

From 2021, Solana experienced explosive growth in users, developers, and total value locked (TVL) and became a major destination for NFTs, DeFi, and Web3 apps, especially know for popular memecoins.

The Total Value Locked (TVL) in Solana’s DeFi protocols reached an all-time high of $7.8 billion, a 105% year-over-year increase. Decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes hit $107 billion last month, reflecting a 100% year-over-year growth.

The U.S. policy and regulatory environment has changed with the new administration, now championing innovators of crypto a digital assets, and the genuinely positive excitement at the conference was infectious.

Added Nazarov, Chainlink, “I’ve never seen the U.S. government or other governments all over the world more positive on creating [a] permissive, proactive kind of acceleration of our industry…. That’s going to unlock a lot of institutional capital, a lot of institutional great tokenized equities, commodities, funds. And that’s going to be really the next iteration of our industry.”

Senator Bill Hagerty used the conference to discuss frameworks like the GENIUS Act with a focus on government policy to modernize financial infrastructure, the blockchain payment system, and increased standards for efficiency and stablecoin regulation noting the maturing relationship between the blockchain ecosystem and Washington, D.C.

Hagerty said, “We started working on this to take the stablecoin industry into the modern era here in America. Today we’ve been relying on a system, a payment system, that was designed in the 1970s and the 1980s. It’s clunky. It’s inefficient. It takes days to clear a payment. If we’re able to move this on to blockchain technology, it can be almost instantaneous. So we’re going to take this outdated system in America, put it into the 21st century.”

Added Rutter, “We’re finally seeing the maturation on the DeFi and crypto space developing enough and clarity on the regulatory side that we can bring these amazing ecosystems together.”

The Solana ecosystem is intentionally courting regulatory clarity and legislative partnerships as DeFi takes a leap forward into maturing as a viable public utility. The Solana Foundation launched the Solana Attestation Service (SAS) — a decentralized identity and verification framework to support KYC/AML needs and enhance trust in on-chain applications, better aligning with regulatory requirements for robust identity tooling in DeFi and blockchain-based financial markets.

There was a lot of talk in the private markets community on the conference fringes
about fairmint’s Open Captable Protocol (OCP) whitepaper, launched in advance of Accelerate. I sat down with Joris Delanoue, a co-author of the whitepaper, and the chief executive officer of fairmint, an SEC registered Transfer Agent processing over $1 billion of digital private markets securities a year.

Delanou explained, “This protocol (standard) aims to provide a secure, compliant, and standardized foundation for on-chain equity management, enabling regulated intermediaries to enhance their service offerings.”

Delanoue goes on to quote SEC Chair Paul Atkins’ Keynote Address at the Crypto Task Force Roundtable on Tokenization earlier this month, “This movement of securities from off-chain to on-chain systems is akin to the transition of audio recordings from analog vinyl records to cassette tapes to digital software decades ago.”

The opportunity for firms in the Solana community to adopt the OCP standard for private markets securities is not lost on anyone in the ATS space as it is seen as a standard to (excuse the pun) accelerate the issuance and adoption of tokenized private market securities.

Another big conference announcement catching the attention of the TradFi crowd sees Kraken, the crypto exchange, with plans to launch tokenized public market stocks to non-U.S. residents in partnership with Backed Finance, based in Zug Switzerland, and Solana. Backed is one of the OGs tokenizing U.S. stocks for non-U.S. residents, a growing market.

Mark Greenberg, head of consumer business for Kraken said, “Why can’t I trade my equities on a Saturday or at 2 a.m.? Why can’t I store it in a self-custodial wallet?…. All those are things that we’ve been thinking about how do we solve, and xStocks is our approach to actually doing that.”

Time will tell whether Solana can successfully take on Ethereum’s dominant market position as the public protocol of choice for TradFi players and RWAs. Accelerate most certainly demonstrated the intent and the broad community support in a more collaborative U.S. policy and regulatory environment.

Game on.