Solana’s latest phase looks a lot less flashy than its memecoin-fueled highs, and perhaps that’s the point.
Armani Ferrante, CEO of crypto exchange Backpack, told CoinDesk in an interview that the Solana ecosystem has spent the last year focusing on a more sober focus: financial infrastructure. After years of experimentation as the broader crypto industry focused on NFTs, gaming and social tokens, attention is now turning to finance, commerce and decentralized payments.
“People are really starting to look at blockchains as a new type of financial infrastructure,” said Ferrante, who will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Hong Kong next month. “It’s less about NFTs, less about random moonshot games, and a lot more about finance.”
The change made Solana boring to some outside observers, but Ferrante presented it as a sign of maturity. The network is increasingly positioned around high-speed on-chain trading, market structure and settlement, what some have dubbed “internet capital markets.”
This pivot comes amid a stark divide between crypto sentiment and traditional finance. As cryptocurrency 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, highlighting the growing momentum around tokenization, stablecoins and on-chain settlement.
Ferrante argued that the long-term case for Solana, and blockchains in general, rests on their role as neutral settlement layers. In this future, assets such as stocks and derivatives will flow seamlessly between platforms as standardized tokens rather than remaining in siled databases.
“A token is just a canonical, agreed-upon entry in the ledger for who owns something,” Ferrante said. “This concept applies everywhere.”
Ferrante emphasized that real-world adoption will require deeper integration with regulatory frameworks, not evasion. As crypto moves from speculative experimentation to integrated 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 isn’t child’s play.”
In Ferrante’s view, Solana’s bet is that building this reality, even at the cost of hype, will pay off as global finance moves more on-chain.
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