The Most Degen Chain Becomes the Most Institutional Chain, Long live
@solana
Personally, I think
@solana generated more buzz than any other protocol at this year’s KBW.
If I had to describe this KBW in one word, it would be “polarization.” Institutions and onchain perp traders were, in many ways, the two main characters of the week.
On one side, you had people in suits discussing regulation and financial infrastructure. On the other, you had traders literally operating their keyboards and mice with their toes while talking about leverage and PnL.
They’re basically the two opposite ends of the crypto spectrum.
And yet, what I found particularly interesting was that Solana managed to capture both extremes, not only through its products, but also through its presence and activities throughout KBW.
On the institutional side, Solana was working with the likes of Hanwha Asset Management, Shinhan Asset Management, Shinhan Bank, and Jeonbuk Bank on real financial use cases, including ETF tokenization and stablecoin remittance PoCs.
x.lingyaoai.com/superteam/status/21063…
On the degen side, they brought in
@jadoodoo_ and basically took over the entire CT timeline for the week.
x.lingyaoai.com/SolanaFloor/status/210…
So at the same time, Solana is being recognized by institutions as an optimized venue for tokenization and payments, while being recognized by degens as one of the best chains to ape on.
I think that’s incredibly difficult to pull off.
Positioning yourself as a “general-purpose chain” can easily leave you stuck in the middle, not quite dominating any particular vertical.
But if you get it right, the upside is the exact opposite: you can bring virtually every sector of blockchain under a single ecosystem.
In that sense, I think Solana is currently showing us one of the best examples of what a successful general-purpose blockchain can look like.
Of course, none of this can be achieved by the chain alone.
It takes an ecosystem of partners actually building real use cases on top of the infrastructure and bridging completely different audiences from institutions to degens.
And I think much of what we saw during KBW was possible because of the work done by
@SuperteamKorea and
@SolanaFndn and the many other ecosystem partners behind the scenes.
@solana
NEW: Trader
@jadoochicken goes wild on stage after scoring a ~$40K profit on a
$NEAR long during the
@joinfrontier Perps Trading Competition semifinal in South Korea.