The Ultimate Solana Thesis: How Galaxy's Michael Marcantonio Sees Solana Capturing the $500 Trillion Global Securities Market

The world of traditional finance operates within a fortress of intermediaries—banks, clearinghouses, and massive financial institutions that have historically held monopolistic power over the flows of global capital. According to Michael Marcantonio, Head of DeFi at Galaxy, this system is not only ripe for disruption but actively being dismantled by blockchain technology, with Solana positioned at the center of this transformation.

Top Projects

Lulo

Score: 7,586.13

Bonk

Score: 4,806.12

Sphere

Score: 2,544.42

Moonwalk

Score: 2,026.11

In a comprehensive discussion on the Lightspeed podcast, Marcantonio laid out Galaxy's thesis for why Solana represents the most compelling opportunity in blockchain today: by the end of the decade, Solana will trade a majority of publicly tradable tokenized securities, operating on rails with 20-millisecond block times, multiple concurrent leaders, and capacity for a million transactions per second. This isn't merely a bet on the best blockchain—it's a wager on which network can become a global world supercomputer.

The Broken Financial System and the Case for Disruption

The current global financial system has failed average people for decades. Marcantonio's critique is pointed: the top one percent have gained exponentially in growth and wealth while ordinary people struggle to access capital. The system is protected by powerful intermediaries and a maze of regulations that serve to maintain the status quo rather than enable economic participation.

"Throughout my entire lifetime, this system has not benefited average people," Marcantonio stated. "It's been quite the opposite. We've seen the top 1% gain exponentially in growth and wealth while normal people are not only not doing well, but are not doing well because they can't get access to capital."

This critique sets the stage for understanding why blockchain technology, and Solana specifically, represents such a significant opportunity. The promise of permissionless, transparent, and composable financial infrastructure directly addresses these systemic failures by removing the intermediaries that have historically extracted value from the system.

SEC Chair Atkins and the Regulatory Green Light

A pivotal moment that Marcantonio believes hasn't received sufficient attention occurred in August 2025 when SEC Chair Atkins announced Project Crypto. The directive was clear: the core financial machinery of global capital markets must move on-chain. This regulatory shift represents a fundamental change in how traditional securities will be traded and settled.

"What he said was the core financial machinery of global capital markets must move on chain," Marcantonio explained. "And when you think about it, now is the time for a two move on chain."

This regulatory development provides the framework for understanding Galaxy's strategic positioning. With the regulatory winds shifting favorably, the question becomes which blockchain is best equipped to absorb and process the $500 trillion global capital market. Galaxy's analysis points definitively to Solana.

Why Galaxy Chose Solana Over All Other Blockchains

Galaxy operates as one of the largest publicly traded companies in DeFi, building technology to enable high-frequency trading at scale on decentralized networks. After evaluating all available blockchains, the firm concluded that Solana is uniquely positioned to serve as the execution layer for global tokenized securities trading.

"We looked at all the blockchains and we say to ourselves, which blockchains are best suited to absorb the $500 trillion global capital market," Marcantonio explained. "There's really only one blockchain today that can sustain, absorb the global financial machinery of not just today, but tomorrow. And that's Solana."

The technical specifications are compelling: Solana currently processes 65,000 transactions per second and is expected to reach 150,000 by next year. By the end of the decade, with multiple concurrent leaders enabled, the network could achieve 20-millisecond block times and a million transactions per second. These numbers aren't theoretical—Solana already demonstrates this capacity in practice, consistently posting the highest volumes and revenue across all blockchains over the past 18 months.

The Decentralized NASDAQ Thesis

Solana's competitive advantage extends beyond raw throughput. The network's architecture provides instant settlement, which fundamentally changes the calculus when comparing against traditional exchanges like NASDAQ. Traditional markets operate on T+1 settlement, meaning transactions don't settle until a day after execution. This creates significant costs, counterparty risks, and capital inefficiencies.

"When you look at Nasdaq versus Solana, you can't just look at tick to trade. You also must look at the T plus one settlement," Marcantonio noted. "And when you factor in T plus one settlement, no centralized system today, especially in tradFi can compete with any decentralized network."

With upcoming improvements like Alpenglow, Solana is targeting settlement between 100 to 150 milliseconds. When combined with the network's global distribution, this creates a compelling alternative to co-located trading at centralized exchanges.

Why Not Stripe's L1 or Other Corporate Blockchains?

The blockchain landscape includes numerous corporate-backed chains, including Stripe's upcoming L1 called Tempo. Marcantonio acknowledged these competitors but explained why Solana maintains its edge: the velocity of innovation on a decentralized network consistently outpaces centralized alternatives.

"The bet that we are making is that Anza, Firedancer, and the entire ecosystem on Solana can move faster at hitting a point of velocity sufficient to absorb the $500 trillion of global securities that are traded every year," he explained.

Corporate chains face two significant challenges: attracting a robust ecosystem of applications and developers, and scaling fast enough to compete with Solana's current capabilities. Since Solana already operates at scale with a thriving ecosystem, any competitor starts from a significant disadvantage. The decentralized development model, with multiple teams like Anza and Firedancer working on client implementations, creates a compounding innovation advantage that centralized teams struggle to match.

Multiple Concurrent Leaders and Global Distribution

The Multiple Concurrent Leaders (MCL) thesis reframes the question of tick-to-trade latency entirely. Traditional thinking about trading speed assumes proximity to centralized exchange infrastructure. MCL changes this equation by distributing block production globally, creating validators incentivized to be positioned near information sources worldwide.

"If something happens in the Middle East that changes asset prices on the NASDAQ, it's still going to take 75 milliseconds to get there," Marcantonio explained. "The NASDAQ is no faster than any other blockchain that can process at 75 milliseconds from absorbing information from the Middle East. But with MCL, you're going to have validators in the Middle East that are incentivized to be in the Middle East that when they are the leader, they will absorb that information."

This global distribution makes Solana not merely competitive with NASDAQ but potentially superior for certain types of price-sensitive trading. A globally distributed system can absorb information faster than any single location-based exchange.

Understanding Solana DATs: Superior Leverage Vehicles

Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) represent a new category of publicly traded investment vehicles, pioneered by MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy. Marcantonio explained why well-managed Solana DATs provide superior leverage compared to all other potential vehicles for traders and investors.

"Microstrategy pioneered this strategy, which is converting volatility into increased equity gains," he noted. "They do it through a bunch of different novel creative strategies. One way they do it is they leverage up their volatility by issuing convertible notes to the market."

Traditional leverage options—leveraged ETFs and margin trading—both carry significant drawbacks. Leveraged ETFs suffer from volatility drift, where daily resets erode returns over time. A 2x leveraged position that experiences 10% up followed by 10% down doesn't return to the starting point; it ends at 96% of initial value. Margin trading exposes investors to liquidation risk during adverse price movements.

Convertible notes issued by publicly traded companies solve these problems. Companies can issue five-year notes at near-zero coupon rates because buyers value the embedded call option within the notes. This structure provides leverage without margin calls and eliminates the daily reset problem of leveraged ETFs.

Why Solana DATs Excel Over Bitcoin DATs

Solana's characteristics make it particularly powerful as an underlying asset for DATs. With Bitcoin's annualized volatility around 41% and Solana's approximately 80%, Solana DATs can issue more favorable convertible notes to the market. The higher volatility makes the embedded call option more valuable, allowing the DAT to borrow on better terms.

"Solana's almost 51% more volatile than Bitcoin, which should mean that a sold debt can issue more favorable convertible notes to the market," Marcantonio explained.

But the advantages extend beyond volatility. Solana's staking yield provides a significant free cash flow advantage that Bitcoin simply cannot offer. A hypothetical $10 billion Solana DAT would generate between $700 and $800 million in annual free cash flow simply by staking its holdings. This creates a safety buffer for convertible note obligations and provides capital for strategic initiatives.

Forward Industries: The Apex Predator Strategy

Forward Industries, backed by Galaxy, Jump, and Multicoin Capital, represents the largest Solana DAT currently in existence with approximately $1.65 billion in SOL. The strategic combination of these three entities—Galaxy's asset management expertise, Jump's high-frequency trading capabilities, and Multicoin's venture vision—positions Forward as a formidable force in the Solana ecosystem.

"Galaxy, top asset manager in the world for crypto. One of the largest footprints of all publicly traded companies in DeFi. Jump, arguably the best high-frequency trading company on earth. And multi-coin, arguably the most visionary Solana venture fund out there, most strategic, most visionary. Those three together, what are you going to get?"

The answer, according to Marcantonio, is a fully vertically integrated DeFi trading and execution stack spanning from validator operations through RPCs to trading execution and order flow aggregation.

Stake Weight: Solana's Unique Structural Advantage

Solana's stake weight system provides Forward with competitive advantages that don't exist on any other blockchain. When Forward stakes its $1.65 billion in SOL on its validator, it gains two critical properties: faster state updates and prioritized transaction processing.

The first advantage relates to how Solana propagates state updates through its turbine tree architecture. The leader sends state updates to a root node, which then propagates to the top 200 validators by stake weight. Higher stake weight means receiving price updates before competitors—a significant edge in trading environments.

"Imagine you're trading on Binance and because you own more BNB tokens, you got actually price updates faster. That's the equivalent on Solana," Marcantonio explained.

The second advantage comes from stake-weighted quality of service, which provides a larger "tunnel" for pushing transactions through to leaders. In periods of network congestion, higher stake weight translates to better execution priority.

Prop AMMs: DeFi's Answer to Centralized Exchanges

One of the most exciting developments in Solana DeFi has been the emergence of prop AMMs (proprietary automated market makers), which have achieved something previously thought impossible: tighter spreads on-chain than Binance. When factoring in the fees charged by centralized exchanges versus the fee-free trading through prop AMMs, on-chain execution now provides better fills than the world's largest crypto exchange.

"This is the first instance where there are tighter spreads on chain than Binance," Marcantonio emphasized. "And so like this is incredibly exciting."

Prop AMMs leverage the continuous block-building nature of Solana's architecture. By updating oracle prices tens or hundreds of times per slot, these systems can track centralized exchange prices with remarkable precision. The theoretical limit—updating the oracle 100,000 times per slot—would make prop AMMs vastly superior to any centralized exchange.

The Competitive Dynamics of On-Chain Market Making

The tight spreads offered by prop AMMs result from intense competition among these market makers to fill orders from aggregators like Jupiter, Titan, and DeFlo. This competitive dynamic creates a flywheel effect: as more order flow moves on-chain, more market makers compete, driving spreads even tighter.

"Right now prop AMMs are quoting so tight because they're so competitive," Marcantonio noted. "These prop AMMs are in a dog fight to fill Jupiter or Titan or Deflow orders or OKX orders."

The implications for tokenized securities are profound. If Forward Industries issues tokenized stock on Solana and these prop AMMs compete to provide liquidity, the spreads could potentially be tighter than those offered by NASDAQ's designated market makers. This would fundamentally shift the incentives for publicly traded companies considering tokenization.

DeFi's Unique Capability: Pricing Illiquid Assets

Traditional finance has no mechanism for pricing illiquid assets. Millions of private companies worldwide have securities that cannot access liquid markets—both due to regulatory constraints and because market makers won't hold positions in thinly traded instruments. DeFi solves this problem through its decentralized exchange infrastructure.

"When you analogize a private security to a meme coin, all of a sudden you have the rails on chain that don't exist in tradfi to price illiquid assets," Marcantonio explained.

Consider project finance: someone wanting to build a solar farm traditionally must navigate complex tax equity structures and beg wealthy individuals for capital. Token issuance transforms this from a hyperlocal market limited by one's rolodex to a global market accessible to anyone. The solar farm could issue tokens representing equity stakes, with distributions tied to on-chain revenue flows.

The Architecture of Decentralized Markets

When examining the complete ecosystem of aggregators, meta-aggregators, DEXs, and prop AMMs, a coherent structure emerges. Meta-aggregators and aggregators function as the price discovery layer, while DEXs and prop AMMs act as market makers. Collectively, this architecture creates what Marcantonio describes as a decentralized NASDAQ—already operational for non-securities assets.

"When you put DEXs together with prop AMMs and with market making and with Jupiter and with Titan and with DFLO and with all of these other aggregators, collectively, they are a decentralized NASDAQ already," he stated.

The regulatory framework is the remaining piece. Once securities can legally trade on these platforms, the infrastructure is ready to absorb that volume with execution quality potentially exceeding traditional markets.

Composability: The Killer Feature of Monolithic Chains

One of Solana's most significant advantages as a monolithic blockchain is its elimination of liquidity fragmentation. Unlike Layer 2 solutions that create separate liquidity pools requiring bridging, every application on Solana shares the same state and can compose transactions atomically.

The efficiency implications are substantial. Currently, the traditional financial system operates through siloed systems with separate ledgers for equities, currencies, commodities, and bonds. Reconciling these ledgers creates a "reconciliation industrial complex" where intermediaries spend enormous resources matching up different states.

"If all of these assets traded on Solana, they would in effect be on all one global state. That would be a massive efficiency gain," Marcantonio explained. "And what you'd be able to do is you'd be able to borrow against your securities to make a bet on currency markets or borrow against your securities to invest in bonds. And you'd be able to do this in one seamless atomic transaction."

The Real-World Costs of Fragmented Systems

The inefficiencies of fragmented ledgers create real losses. Marcantonio cited the Citibank incident from 2020 or 2021, where a ledger error resulted in nearly a billion dollars being sent to the wrong recipients in a Revlon payment. The litigation lasted years. More recently, there was a near-miss involving $81 trillion in a ledger error.

These errors occur because institutions must constantly reconcile different ledger states. The problem compounds when crossing asset classes—equities and currencies use entirely different systems with no standardization between them. Blockchain technology's shared state eliminates this reconciliation requirement entirely.

Why Layer 2s May Struggle With Tokenized Securities

Marcantonio presented a controversial but well-reasoned thesis: centralized Layer 2 networks may face insurmountable regulatory barriers for trading tokenized securities. The logic stems from how securities regulations developed over 90 years.

"If the SEC were to allow a centralized chain L2 to trade tokenized securities without registering as an exchange or broker dealer, what does that say to NASDAQ?" he asked. "NASDAQ will immediately launch an L2 and circumvent all of the existing rules that it has to apply with."

The limiting principle that makes sense from a regulatory perspective is decentralization. If a network is sufficiently decentralized and protocols are sufficiently autonomous, there's nothing to regulate—humans cannot intercede into the market to commit fraud. But for networks with centralized sequencers, those operators could theoretically register as exchanges, creating an asymmetric regulatory playing field.

The Path to Layer 2 Decentralization

For Layer 2s to compete for tokenized securities trading, they must decentralize their sequencers. This is easier said than done—centralized sequencers generate significant revenue from their privileged position. Converting from a profitable centralized model to a decentralized one requires sacrificing short-term revenue for long-term positioning.

Marcantonio highlighted the structural challenge: "It's much easier to get a majority, super majority support on Solana across a decentralized network than it is to get one centralized sequencer to decentralized."

Based rollups represent progress on this front by pushing some sequencing to the Layer 1, but adoption has been slower than expected. The regulatory pressure from tokenized securities could provide the catalyst needed to accelerate decentralization efforts across the L2 ecosystem.

Galaxy's Conglomerate Strategy

Galaxy's business model encompasses trading, staking, investment banking, asset management, ventures, and now data centers through the Helios acquisition. These diverse operations create synergies that amplify each individual business line.

The Bitcoin mining operation provides a concrete example. While many miners failed during the 2022 crash because they didn't hedge their Bitcoin or energy exposure, Galaxy's integrated structure allowed them to implement sophisticated hedging strategies from day one. When Bitcoin prices exceeded energy costs, miners ran. When energy prices exceeded Bitcoin value, Galaxy sold power back to the grid.

"We had the system set up, which is when the price of Bitcoin exceeded the price of energy on the free market in Texas, we turned our Bitcoin miners on and started printing Bitcoin. When the energy price exceeded the price of Bitcoin, we turned our miners off and we sold power back to the grid. We never lost money," Marcantonio recalled.

Galaxy One: The Next Evolution

Galaxy's newest initiative, Galaxy One, led by former BlockFi CEO Zach Prince, represents the firm's continued evolution. The platform will offer credit investor products that leverage Galaxy's lending capabilities and broader infrastructure.

The integrated model allows Galaxy to offer services that standalone businesses cannot. Institutional staking clients, for example, can access instant liquidity during unbonding periods because Galaxy's balance sheet can bridge that gap. This creates stickier relationships and higher-value services for institutional clients.

DATs as Apex Predators of Crypto

Publicly traded DATs possess structural advantages over every other type of crypto investment vehicle. Their access to equity and debt capital markets at favorable terms makes them uniquely powerful accumulators of digital assets.

"Publicly traded debts are the apex predators of crypto right now," Marcantonio stated. "They have superior access to capital."

This creates interesting possibilities for industry consolidation. DATs could potentially execute hostile takeovers of smaller DATs or even pursue acquisitions of DeFi protocols. While governance tokens don't currently provide the same control rights as equity shares in a corporation, the evolution of tokenized securities could change this dynamic.

The Political Revolution of Decentralized Networks

Beyond the economic advantages, Marcantonio framed the blockchain movement as a political revolution. Decentralized networks are fundamentally about dismantling incumbent power structures and replacing them with transparent, permissionless alternatives.

"We are not only economic actors building economic tools. We are political revolutionaries. We are actively engaged in a political battle without even realizing it at times," he argued. "Changing a broken, fractured, monopolistic, entrenched system that is often quite corrupt in favor of a free and transparent system."

Decentralization provides political resilience. Without a centralized leadership to attack, established interests cannot use their traditional playbook against blockchain networks. Any individual participant can be removed without affecting the network's continued operation.

Helium: A Case Study in Decentralized Innovation

Helium demonstrates the power of decentralized coordination for tackling incumbent industries. Building a telecommunications network traditionally requires navigating extensive regulations, hiring lobbyists, and deploying massive infrastructure investments. The barriers to competing with companies like Verizon seem insurmountable through conventional means.

Helium's approach bypasses these barriers entirely. By issuing tokens that incentivize participants to host hotspots, the network grows organically without centralized planning. Participants simply plug in hardware and contribute to the network. The project has expanded to mapping services that compete with Google's street-view data by incentivizing users to capture images while driving.

"If you're going to take on the legacy industries, not having a head to chop off of the snake is very important," Marcantonio noted.

What Solana Must Do to Succeed

Despite his bullishness, Marcantonio identified clear risks facing Solana. The biggest threat is that the network doesn't ship fast enough and that infighting between Anza, Firedancer, and other ecosystem players hampers progress.

"They got to get on the same page and they got to ship and they ship fast," he emphasized. "We can't be having squirmishes about like, whether or not we should increase the CU limit to 80 million CUs or keep it at 60 million CUs."

The historical lesson from other blockchains is clear: philosophical debates about direction can cannibalize network development. Solana's ecosystem must maintain alignment on the core mission of scaling to capture the global securities market.

The Challenge of Success

Success itself creates challenges. Developers who became wealthy during bull markets may lack the hunger of those working on ramen budgets with big visions. Maintaining motivation when the financial pressure is reduced requires keeping focus on the larger prize.

"Think about the bigger picture here," Marcantonio urged. "It's not just like optimizing this piece of a network or minimizing latency here. It's about competing for the biggest prize out there."

The bags accumulated to date are tiny compared to what awaits if Solana can capture the global securities market. That perspective should keep ecosystem participants focused on continued shipping rather than resting on current accomplishments.

Ship or Die: The Imperative for Solana's Future

Marcantonio's message to the Solana ecosystem was stark: "Ship or die." The window of opportunity created by favorable regulatory conditions won't remain open indefinitely. Competitors are working to catch up, and the first-mover advantage in tokenized securities will determine market structure for decades.

All actors in the ecosystem—validators, core developers, application builders, and institutional players like Galaxy—must maintain laser focus on scaling and shipping improvements. The prize is nothing less than becoming the execution layer for the global financial system.

Conclusion: The Path to Internet Capital Markets

Galaxy's thesis for Solana represents the most comprehensive articulation yet of how blockchain technology could transform global finance. The combination of technical capabilities already demonstrated, favorable regulatory developments, and structural advantages in scalability and composability position Solana uniquely for this opportunity.

The path requires execution: continued scaling through initiatives like multiple concurrent leaders, maintaining the ecosystem coordination that has driven Solana's success to date, and the development of sophisticated DeFi primitives like prop AMMs that can offer execution quality exceeding traditional exchanges.

If successful, Solana evolves from merely the best blockchain to something far more significant—what Marcantonio describes as the digital Suez Canal, the digital Panama Canal, the digital Strait of Hormuz. A piece of critical global infrastructure that transcends its origins as a technology project to become a geopolitical force shaping how capital flows throughout the world economy.

Facts + Figures

• Galaxy is described as "probably the largest publicly traded company in DeFi today," building high-frequency trading technology at scale on decentralized networks

• Solana currently processes 65,000 transactions per second and is expected to reach 150,000 transactions per second by next year

• By the end of the decade, Solana is projected to achieve 20-millisecond block times with multiple concurrent leaders and capacity for 1 million transactions per second

• The global securities market represents approximately $500 trillion in annual trading volume that could potentially migrate on-chain

• Forward Industries, backed by Galaxy, Jump, and Multicoin Capital, holds approximately $1.65 billion in SOL, making it the largest Solana DAT

• A hypothetical $10 billion Solana DAT would generate between $700-800 million in annual free cash flow through staking alone

• Bitcoin's annualized volatility is approximately 41%, while Solana's is approximately 80%, making Solana potentially more valuable as an underlying asset for DAT convertible notes

• SEC Chair Atkins announced Project Crypto in August 2025, directing that core financial machinery must move on-chain

• Prop AMMs now offer tighter spreads on-chain than Binance when factoring in exchange fees, marking the first time on-chain execution has been superior to centralized exchanges

• Citibank experienced a near $1 billion ledger error in the Revlon payment situation around 2020-2021, with recent near-misses involving $81 trillion in ledger errors

• Current settlement in traditional markets operates on T+1 (one day after trade), while Solana provides instant settlement with Alpenglow targeting 100-150 millisecond settlement times

• Solana's stake-weighted quality of service provides higher-stake validators priority access to the top 200 positions in the turbine tree for faster state updates

• Galaxy announced Galaxy One, a new platform led by former BlockFi CEO Zach Prince, targeting credit investors

• Ethereum staking yields approximately 3-4%, while Solana staking yields approximately 7-8%, providing Solana DATs with significantly higher free cash flow

Questions Answered

Why does Galaxy believe Solana is the best blockchain for institutional adoption?

Galaxy believes Solana is uniquely positioned because it's the only blockchain that can currently absorb the $500 trillion global securities market while offering instant settlement and composability that traditional finance cannot match. The network already processes 65,000 transactions per second in practice—not just theoretically—and consistently posts the highest volumes and revenue across all blockchains. When combined with upcoming improvements like multiple concurrent leaders that will enable 20-millisecond block times and a million transactions per second, Solana becomes competitive with or superior to centralized exchanges like NASDAQ, particularly when factoring in the elimination of T+1 settlement delays.

What are Solana DATs and why do they matter?

Solana DATs (Digital Asset Treasuries) are publicly traded companies that hold Solana as their primary treasury asset and use sophisticated capital market strategies to increase SOL holdings per share over time. They matter because they provide superior leverage compared to alternatives like leveraged ETFs (which suffer from volatility drift) or margin trading (which creates liquidation risk). Solana DATs can issue five-year convertible notes at near-zero interest rates because buyers value the embedded call option, and Solana's higher volatility (approximately 80% annualized versus Bitcoin's 41%) makes these options more valuable. Additionally, Solana DATs generate 7-8% free cash flow through staking, creating safety buffers and capital for strategic initiatives that Bitcoin DATs cannot access.

How do prop AMMs provide better execution than Binance?

Prop AMMs achieve tighter spreads than Binance by leveraging Solana's continuous block-building architecture to update their oracle prices tens or hundreds of times per slot. This allows them to track centralized exchange prices with remarkable precision despite Solana's 400-millisecond block times. When factoring in the fees charged by Binance versus the fee-free trading through prop AMMs, on-chain execution now provides better fills than the world's largest crypto exchange. The competition between prop AMMs to win order flow from aggregators like Jupiter and Titan creates a dynamic that continuously drives spreads tighter, potentially even below what traditional market makers offer on exchanges like NASDAQ.

What advantages does Solana's stake weight system provide to large validators?

Solana's stake weight system provides two critical advantages that don't exist on other blockchains. First, validators with higher stake weight receive state updates faster because they're positioned higher in the turbine tree architecture—the top 200 validators by stake weight receive updates first from the root node, meaning faster price information than competitors. Second, stake-weighted quality of service provides larger validators with prioritized transaction processing during network congestion. For a fully integrated DeFi operation, these advantages translate to better trading execution and the ability to push transactions through when others face delays.

Why might Layer 2 blockchains struggle to trade tokenized securities?

Layer 2s with centralized sequencers may face insurmountable regulatory barriers because the SEC needs a limiting principle for where tokenized securities can trade. If regulators allowed centralized L2s to trade securities without registering as exchanges, NASDAQ could immediately launch its own L2 and circumvent 90 years of securities regulations. The logical limiting principle is decentralization: if a network is sufficiently decentralized and protocols are sufficiently autonomous, there's nothing to regulate because humans cannot intercede to commit fraud. Centralizesequencers could register as exchanges, but this creates competitive disadvantages against truly decentralized networks like Solana.

What does Galaxy One represent for the company's strategy?

Galaxy One represents Galaxy's continued evolution as a comprehensive crypto financial services provider, led by former BlockFi CEO Zach Prince. The platform will offer products to credit investors by leveraging Galaxy's lending capabilities, balance sheet, and integrated infrastructure. Galaxy's conglomerate model creates synergies between its trading, staking, investment banking, asset management, ventures, and data center businesses. For example, staking clients can access instant liquidity during unbonding periods because Galaxy's balance sheet bridges the gap. This integrated approach allows Galaxy to offer services that standalone businesses cannot provide.

How does DeFi solve the problem of pricing illiquid assets?

DeFi creates the first infrastructure for pricing illiquid assets at scale through decentralized exchanges that can hold and trade any tokenized asset. In traditional finance, millions of private companies worldwide have securities that cannot access liquid markets because market makers won't hold thinly traded positions. When private securities are tokenized and traded on DEXs—analogous to how meme coins trade today—they gain access to global liquidity rather than being limited to local networks. This transforms project finance, allowing solar farms or other projects to raise capital globally through token issuance rather than navigating complex local fundraising structures.

What does Solana need to improve to capture the securities market?

The biggest risk facing Solana is failing to ship fast enough due to infighting between ecosystem participants like Anza, Firedancer, and other players. Historical examples from other blockchains show how philosophical debates about direction can cannibalize development efforts. Solana's ecosystem must maintain alignment on the core mission and avoid getting bogged down in debates over technical details like CU limits or block time parameters. Additionally, success creates its own challenge: wealthy developers may lose the hunger of those working with limited resources toward big visions. The ecosystem must maintain focus on the larger prize rather than resting on current accomplishments.

What makes Solana superior to corporate blockchains like Stripe's Tempo?

Solana's advantage over corporate blockchains stems from the velocity of innovation that decentralized networks achieve through coordinated independent effort. Anza, Firedancer, and the broader ecosystem can move faster at scaling than centralized teams because decentralized actors working toward shared goals consistently outpace top-down development. Corporate chains face two significant hurdles: attracting a robust ecosystem of applications and developers, and scaling fast enough to compete with Solana's current capabilities. Since Solana already operates at scale with a thriving ecosystem, any competitor starts from a significant disadvantage and must catch up while Solana continues advancing.