Solana’s latest phase looks a lot less flashy than its memecoin-powered heights, and that may be the goal.
Armani Ferrante, CEO of crypto exchange Backpack, told CoinDesk in an interview that the Solana ecosystem has spent the past year doubling down on a more sober focus: financial infrastructure. After years of experimentation where the broader crypto industry focused on NFTs, games and social tokens, attention is now shifting back towards decentralized finance, commerce and payments.
“People are really starting to think about blockchains as a new kind of financial infrastructure,” said Ferrante, who will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month. “It’s less about NFTs, less about random moonshot-like games, and a lot more about economics.”
That shift has left Solana feeling dull to some outside observers, but Ferrante framed it as a sign of maturity. The network is increasingly positioning itself around high-throughput onchain trading, market structure and settlement, what some have dubbed “internet capital markets.”
The turning point comes amid a sharp divide between crypto sentiment and traditional finance. While crypto prices remain subdued and crypto-native investors remain cautious, Ferrante said institutional interest has rarely been stronger.
“If you ask anyone on Wall Street, they’ve never been more bullish,” he said, pointing to growing momentum around tokenization, stablecoins and onchain settlement.
Ferrante argued that the long-term case for Solana, and blockchains more broadly, rests on their role as neutral settlement layers. In that future, assets like stocks and derivatives move seamlessly across platforms as standardized tokens rather than sitting in siled databases.
“A token is just a canonical, agreed-upon ledger record of who owns something,” Ferrante said. “That concept applies everywhere.”
Crucially, Ferrante emphasized that real-world implementation will require deeper integration with regulatory frameworks, not an escape from them. As crypto moves from speculative experimentation towards embedded financial infrastructure, compliance and legal clarity become prerequisites rather than obstacles.
“What maturity actually means is the real world,” he said. “And the real world is not a free-for-all.”
In Ferrante’s view, Solana’s bet is that building to this reality, even at the expense of hype, will pay off as more of global finance moves down the chain.
Read more: Ethereum and Solana set the stage for 2026’s DeFi reboot
