Internet Capital Market 2026: Structural Shifts in the US and Strategic Windows for Asian Institutions

null 1. The crypto industry is transitioning from experimentation to industrialization

This article is from Tiger Research. New technologies typically go through four stages on the path from experimentation to industrialization: the experimental phase, the overheated phase, the regulatory intervention phase, and the industrialization phase. The internet completed its experimental phase in the 1990s, experienced the overheating of the dot-com bubble, and ultimately matured into a full-fledged industry after the bubble burst, following the establishment of regulations and standards. Fintech and artificial intelligence follow a similar path, albeit with different paces and forms.

The crypto industry is currently in a transitional zone between the third and fourth phases. After Bitcoin's inception, a small group of developers validated its potential for payments and settlements (experimental phase). During the 2017 ICO frenzy and the 2021 DeFi wave, investors rushed in and out repeatedly (overheated phase). The collapse of FTX in 2022 was both a peak and a turning point. After multiple shakeouts, speculative demand was filtered out, real use cases were validated, and U.S. regulators began shifting toward formalization rather than laissez-faire or suppression (regulatory intervention phase).

Because the crypto industry attempts to directly replace core financial functions such as settlement, payments, and issuance, it creates greater friction with traditional financial institutions, leading to a longer adoption timeline. Now, the crypto industry has finally reached the intersection of regulatory intervention and industrialization.

Progress on the regulatory front is significant. The U.S. Congress passed the GENIUS Act, clarifying the legal status of stablecoins. In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC issued joint interpretive guidance, designating 16 assets, including Solana (SOL), as digital commodities, categorizing assets into five classes, abandoning the old "security/non-security" binary classification, and formally excluding protocol staking from securities law oversight.

Institutional adoption continues to accelerate. The tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market grew by approximately 257% in 15 months, rising from $5.4 billion in early 2025 to $19.3 billion by the end of March 2026. Including stablecoins, the total on-chain asset size has approached nearly $300 billion.

This is not yet enough to call it a mature industry, but industrialization has already begun in tandem with regulatory development.

2. Internet Capital Markets: The ultimate form of the crypto industry

The future that the crypto industry points to as it enters the industrialization phase is a restructuring of the capital market itself. This future can be defined as "Internet Capital Markets" (ICM): a capital market where asset issuance, trading, and settlement all occur on a single public blockchain.

Today's capital markets operate on an architecture designed before the internet existed. When buying or selling a stock, the asset and funds do not settle instantly at the moment of execution. A clearinghouse sits between buyers and sellers, bearing counterparty risk, requiring both parties to post margin, and locking up funds until settlement is complete. In the U.S. market, the transfer of ownership at the depository does not occur until the next business day after execution. Because brokers, exchanges, clearinghouses, and depositories each maintain independent ledgers, they must reconcile with each other daily; any discrepancy delays settlement. Cross-border transactions add currency conversion and multiple national depositories, extending settlement times to T+3 or longer. This architecture, designed for an era when counterparties did not trust each other, has itself become a cost.

In Internet Capital Markets, code takes over the role of the clearinghouse. The buyer's payment and the seller's asset are placed into a smart contract simultaneously, and both transfers are executed as a single transaction. If either party's conditions are not met, the entire transaction automatically cancels, eliminating the possibility of only one party's funds flowing out. Since counterparty risk is eliminated at the code level, there is no need for a clearinghouse to require margin. Because all participants share the same ledger in real time, there is no need for inter-institutional reconciliation. Execution and settlement are completed synchronously within seconds.

The entities driving this transformation are expanding from crypto startups to traditional financial institutions. Institutions that once earned revenue from multi-layered intermediary structures are now themselves participating in this shift. History has repeatedly shown that at every inflection point of infrastructure change, institutions that lag in adoption either pay higher costs or lose their leadership position. The electronic trading transition in the 1990s is a classic example: large institutions reliant on floor trading initially resisted electronic platforms like Island ECN and Instinet, only to passively follow through acquisitions and adoptions after these platforms became the standard. The same is true for the fintech transformation.

This transformation is progressing fastest in the United States. After the dollar became the reserve currency under the Bretton Woods system in 1944, global trade and financial transactions were denominated and settled in dollars. CHIPS processes over $2.2 trillion in payments each business day. The SEC's disclosure standards serve as a reference for the capital market systems of other countries. Over 99% of stablecoins are dollar-denominated. The United States is replicating the same model in Internet Capital Markets.

3. Solana: The concrete realization of Internet Capital Markets

Within the landscape of U.S. Internet Capital Markets, Solana is a public blockchain network that integrates technological foundations, institutional practices, and regulatory design.

Solana's technological foundation has been tested in retail markets. In 2021, DeFi demand caused network congestion, which Solana took as an opportunity to improve throughput and transaction scheduling. During the 2023 meme coin cycle, it validated its throughput claims by sustaining high retail traffic over a prolonged period. In October 2025, a market crash coinciding with an AWS outage caused transaction fees on other chains to spike to $100 per transaction, while Solana continued operating without interruption at $0.0013 per transaction. The infrastructure stability required for institutional finance was first validated through stress tests in a retail environment.

In 2025, Solana established "building Internet Capital Markets" as its official strategy, shifting focus toward institutional payments and asset tokenization. To this end, it launched the Token-2022 standard, embedding freeze, clawback, whitelist management, and confidential balance functions directly into the token itself. Issuers can implement compliance requirements within the token without relying on external systems, solving the core needs of asset holding and transaction eligibility at the protocol layer.

On this infrastructure, seven major U.S. financial institutions have launched proof-of-concepts or completed real transactions on Solana: J.P. Morgan, State Street, Citi, Franklin Templeton, Visa, PayPal, and Western Union. Three of these are among the eight U.S. global systemically important banks (G-SIBs).

Meanwhile, the Solana Policy Institute (SPI) was established in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 2025, hiring the former CEO of the DeFi Education Fund and the former CEO of the Blockchain Association. Rather than waiting for legislation to pass before reacting, it proactively submitted a pilot framework called "Project Open" to the SEC's crypto task force, attempting to establish regulatory precedent first, while simultaneously advancing business diversification and regulatory development.

4. Institutional Practices: Case studies across four domains

Institutional participation in Solana's Internet Capital Markets is unfolding across multiple fronts, but not all participants share the same goals. Understanding this layered activity requires an analytical framework built around two core axes: regulatory posture (compliance-driven vs. frontier-defining) and depth of value chain integration (wrapper layer vs. native layer).

4.1 Banking and Capital Markets: The hidden cost of settlement delays

The banking and capital markets domain encompasses bond issuance, trade finance, and treasury management. It is the core revenue source for traditional financial institutions and the area where Internet Capital Markets' cost advantages are most directly evident. Three sub-domains share a common critical issue: the time gap between trade execution and actual movement of funds.

According to Tiger Research estimates, the opportunity cost of idle funds due to settlement delays in the U.S. Treasury market alone is approximately $32 billion annually. Expanding to the entire U.S. fixed-income market, the annual opportunity cost exceeds $45 billion. The speed limits of the existing financial system impose significant hidden costs on market participants.

On Internet Capital Markets infrastructure, this chronic time gap disappears. Atomic settlement (DvP) bundles asset transfer and payment into a single transaction processed in real time. The clearinghouse is no longer needed, and the reconciliation processes run separately by each institution also vanish. Execution and settlement are completed within seconds (T+0).

State Street × Galaxy: On-chain treasury management (SWEEP). Launched on Solana in May 2026, SWEEP is an on-chain fund for institutional investors. It accepts stablecoin (PYUSD, USDC) or fiat deposits and invests in short-term U.S. Treasuries to generate yield. It implements the traditional finance concept of "sweep accounts" as an on-chain fund. For Web3 foundations holding large amounts of stablecoins, using traditional financial services under existing infrastructure requires first converting stablecoins to dollars, incurring conversion fees and time delays. SWEEP allows institutions to deposit and redeem Treasury-yielding assets directly from their wallets. Ondo Finance's flagship fund, OUSG, made an anchor investment of approximately $200 million at SWEEP's launch, representing about 26% of its TVL at the time.

J.P. Morgan × Galaxy: Commercial paper issuance (USCP). In December 2025, J.P. Morgan arranged a $50 million U.S. commercial paper issuance on the Solana public blockchain. This was not a simulation but one of the earliest real debt securities transactions on a public chain. J.P. Morgan acted as arranger, creating USCP tokens directly on the Solana blockchain. Coinbase and Franklin Templeton served as lead investors and buyers, paying with USDC (issued by Circle). Coinbase provided private key custody and USDC on/off-ramp infrastructure. By combining the stablecoin payment network with on-chain atomic settlement (DvP), the corporate financing cycle, which previously took T+1 to T+2 days through multiple intermediaries, was compressed to real-time completion.

Citi × PwC: Trade finance tokenization (bills of exchange). Citi and PwC completed an internal proof-of-concept on Solana, transforming traditional bills of exchange into tokenized digital assets. In a simulated environment, the entire lifecycle of a bill of exchange (issuance, financing, circulation, settlement) was automated via smart contracts, reducing settlement time from days to minutes and eliminating manual reconciliation costs. This case has strong relevance for Asian financial markets, as the global trade hub is highly concentrated in Asia.

4.2 Payments and Stablecoins: Redesigning the settlement paradigm

Western Union: Global remittances (USDPT). In May 2026, this 175-year-old company, which processes approximately $150 billion in cross-border remittances annually across over 200 countries, issued the dollar payment token USDPT on Solana. In the traditional correspondent banking system, each intermediary bank processes only within its own system and business hours, with settlement typically taking one to two business days and stopping entirely on weekends and holidays. To immediately respond to real-time payment requests from various destination countries, Western Union must pre-position large amounts of dollars in local bank accounts in each country. These pre-funded correspondent account balances remain locked and yield nothing until a transfer occurs.

USDPT fundamentally redesigns this settlement process, shifting the paradigm from "pre-funded reserves" to "real-time on-demand supply." When the cash inventory of an agent in a certain country falls below a threshold, the U.S. headquarters treasury team instantly sends funds via USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital, to that agent's institutional on-chain wallet. Regardless of weekends, nights, or holidays, final settlement is completed rapidly based on Solana's 0.4-second block time. Western Union is also building a Digital Asset Network (DAN), planning to roll out its consumer-facing stablecoin payment service, "Stable by Western Union," to over 40 countries within 2026.

Fiserv: White-label stablecoin for financial institutions (FIUSD). Fiserv announced the launch of the FIUSD white-label stablecoin platform, scheduled to go live on Solana in July 2026. Under the white-label structure, Fiserv provides the technology infrastructure and dollar backing system, allowing each financial institution to issue and offer stablecoins under its own brand. Banks can offer their own digital dollars to customers without building blockchain infrastructure from scratch. The Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the U.S.) has announced it will launch the "Roughrider Coin" on this platform. Fiserv's multilateral network covers approximately 10,000 financial institution clients and 6 million merchants, processing 90 billion transactions annually. It plans to offer FIUSD free of charge to member financial institutions using existing technology.

This structure is directly replicable by Asian financial institutions. For South Korea, the white-label model maps precisely onto the current debate over whether banks or non-bank entities can issue stablecoins. Once the Financial Services Commission (FSC) defines the boundaries and establishes Korean won-denominated rules, this model can be ported.

4.3 Real-World Asset Tokenization: A closed loop from issuance to circulation

Orca × Streamex: Compliant RWA distribution (GLDY). The tokenized listed stock market has long faced a disconnect between issuance and distribution. While multiple exchanges provide secondary trading paths for tokenized assets like listed stocks, non-stock tokenized securities such as bonds, commodities, and private loans lack issuer-controlled, access-qualified liquidity infrastructure after issuance. Issuance technology has advanced, but distribution infrastructure has not kept pace.

In May 2026, Orca launched a permissionless AMM infrastructure that allows issuers to create customizable permissioned pools based on their regulated asset requirements. Streamex, a Nasdaq-listed company, was the first issuer to use this solution to provide secondary liquidity for its gold yield token, GLDY. The operation of the GLDY permissioned pool proceeds in three stages: all investor wallets are frozen by default; only wallets that pass Streamex's KYC verification are automatically unfrozen at the on-chain access control layer; unfrozen wallets engage in peer-to-peer real-time trading in the Orca AMM pool without the need for brokers or auditors. Unlike traditional gold investment products limited by exchange trading hours, GLDY trades 24/7 on Solana, with Monetary Metals' gold lease contract yields paid directly to GLDY holders.

This token-level freeze/unfreeze control mechanism is not limited to gold; it can be directly applied to any regulated asset, including Treasuries, corporate bonds, and private credit. This is precisely why Orca proposed this structure as the trading infrastructure component of its Project Open pilot framework.

Apollo: Private credit tokenization (ACRED). The traditional private loan market, despite its high yields, faces two structural barriers: high minimum investment amounts that restrict access to institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and illiquidity that locks investors in until maturity. In January 2025, Apollo, through Securitize, issued ACRED, a tokenized tranche fund based on its diversified credit fund (ADCF), with a minimum investment of $50k. Within the Solana ecosystem, investors convert ACRED into sACRED wrapped tokens, deposit them into an institutional lending pool as collateral, borrow stablecoins at approximately 60% collateralization (borrowing cost around 3-4%), use the borrowed stablecoins to repurchase ACRED, and repeat the cycle. This achieves an effective leverage of approximately 2.5x, amplifying the base yield of about 7.4% to approximately 12-16%. RedStone oracle provides real-time ACRED price data, and Gauntlet automatically manages liquidation conditions and rebalancing timing.

This leverage structure is viable because of Solana's sub-$0.001 transaction fees and sub-second collateral setup and release speeds. On infrastructure where settlement takes days or each operation incurs significant costs, the same structure would be nearly impossible to execute.

Figure Technology: Expanding liquidity for Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs). Figure is the largest non-bank HELOC issuer in the U.S., with cumulative on-chain loans exceeding $19 billion as of December 2025. It has issued multiple AAA-rated securitizations underwritten by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, and Barclays. Originally, it tokenized HELOCs and operated the Demo Prime pool on its own chain, Provenance. However, the closed ecosystem lacked the DeFi liquidity infrastructure needed to build leverage, limiting capital turnover efficiency. In December 2025, Figure launched the PRIME token, bridging Provenance's loan income rights to Solana via Chainlink CCIP, utilizing the Kamino lending protocol to support up to 9x leverage, with Orca providing AMM depth for the PRIME/PYUSD pool.

Figure's choice of Solana was not driven by technical preference but by capital efficiency. The net interest margin between Demo Prime's 9% yield and Kamino's 6% borrowing cost is amplified through leverage. This strategy is economically sound only if collateral can be set up and released within seconds at sub-$0.001 on Solana. Even for a chain that already has its own blockchain, connecting to public chain liquidity is equally important.

4.4 Infrastructure Diffusion: The formation of network effects

The first three domains address transformations within their respective areas, while infrastructure diffusion deals with the nodes where these transformations converge. Banks issuing bonds on-chain, remittance companies settling with stablecoins, and asset managers tokenizing funds are not happening independently; they are occurring simultaneously on the same infrastructure.

Diffusion occurs across three layers. At the issuance layer, PayPal, Fiserv, Circle, and Tether issue stablecoins or operate issuance infrastructure on Solana, with multiple competing issuers coexisting on the same network. At the settlement layer, Visa has expanded stablecoin settlement to Solana, Worldpay has migrated merchant transaction settlement to the Solana network, and YouTube uses PYUSD on Solana to pay U.S. creators. At the touchpoint layer, SoFi allows 14.7 million customers to purchase SOL directly from their bank accounts and operates its bank-issued stablecoin, SoFiUSD, becoming the first federally chartered bank under OCC supervision to place its own liabilities as a stablecoin on the Solana public chain. Bullish has adopted Solana stablecoins as the primary settlement rail in over 50 jurisdictions and processed $1.15 billion in IPO financing on the Solana network.

When issuance, settlement, and touchpoints operate on the same network, network effects emerge. Tokens issued by banks are settled by payment companies, and consumers hold those assets in banking applications, forming a closed loop. The more participants there are, the greater the utility for each participant. The formation of Internet Capital Markets accelerates the moment this closed loop reaches a critical tipping point.

5. Regulatory Landscape: What has been established and what remains unresolved

The areas that have entered the regulatory framework are relatively broad. Regarding bank crypto asset custody, after the repeal of SAB 121, crypto assets are classified as off-balance-sheet assets, and major custodian banks like BNY Mellon and State Street have launched digital asset trust services. Regarding digital commodity status, 16 assets, including SOL, have been recognized as digital commodities, with protocol staking excluded from securities laws, providing institutional investors with legal and safe grounds to buy, hold, and stake. Regarding stablecoins, the GENIUS Act defines stablecoins as a separate asset class, neither securities nor deposits, imposing federal licensing standards on issuers. Regarding tokenized securities, in March 2026, the SEC approved Nasdaq to trade certain securities in tokenized form, and DTCC confirmed it will launch a limited pilot in July and a full rollout in October, covering Russell 1000 constituents, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. Regarding perpetual futures, the CFTC approved Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual futures contract for the first time, taking the first step in bringing offshore perpetual futures liquidity (approximately $61.7 trillion in 2025) into the U.S. regulated system.

Frontier areas that remain unresolved are equally critical. Free stock trading on public blockchains is currently limited to non-U.S. residents (Reg S) or accredited wealthy investors (Reg D). Although the SEC has discussed an innovative exemption for "third-party stock tokenization" without requiring the listed company's consent, strong opposition from the traditional financial community (Nasdaq, SIFMA, etc.) over liquidity fragmentation leaves final approval uncertain. Regarding DEXs, the SEC issued temporary guidance in April 2026 with a five-year sunset clause, but key regulatory gaps remain, including the attribution of anti-money laundering obligations and order processing responsibilities. Regarding stablecoin interest payments, the GENIUS Act strictly prohibits issuers from paying any form of yield to holders, and the banking industry is even pushing to close third-party channels.

The CLARITY Act is key legislation to comprehensively address these issues. It would define the overall market structure for digital assets, create a spot market regulatory framework for digital commodities, and direct the SEC and CFTC to engage in rulemaking to allow businesses to operate on public blockchains. However, the probability of the bill passing within 2026 is around 50% or lower. Bipartisan disagreements exist over ethical clauses restricting the President and senior officials from profiting from crypto businesses. The legislative window from mid-July to early August, approximately four weeks, is essentially the final deadline for passage this year. Missing this window pushes the timeline into the 2026 midterm election phase, where reaching consensus in a pre-election landscape becomes more difficult.

6. Technical reasons behind institutional choices

Global financial institutions are not choosing Solana out of preference; they are choosing it because it meets the technical requirements of institutional finance.

Settlement economics. Solana's finality time is approximately 0.5 seconds, with an average transaction fee of $0.0013. If every collateral setup and release incurred several dollars in costs or took a day to settle, leverage strategies would be consumed by costs before generating any returns.

Programmable compliance. The Token-2022 standard embeds freeze, clawback, whitelist access, and zero-knowledge proof encrypted balance features at the token level, transforming compliance from a reactive, externally-dependent measure into a proactive design built into the protocol layer. Transaction amounts are encrypted using zero-knowledge proofs, preserving the source and destination on the public ledger, but only the sender, receiver, and designated auditors can see the amount. This is a design that simultaneously ensures auditability and confidentiality.

Institutional-grade stability and evolving infrastructure. To address the vulnerability of a single validator client, Solana is evolving toward a multi-architecture approach running multiple independent validator clients. The technical roadmap aims to reduce finality time from the current 0.5 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds and introduce a pre-execution identity verification structure at the protocol layer.

Full operational sovereignty: Contra. For institutions that cannot expose all transactions and balances on a public ledger or require internally controlled validation and governance, Solana offers the Contra option, independent of the public mainnet. It uses the verified performance foundation of the public network, resetting operational conditions to meet institutional needs.

7. Strategic execution framework for Asian institutions

The phase where Asian financial institutions, as first movers, design infrastructure from scratch is over. The pragmatic path is to act as fast followers, adopting infrastructure and regulatory references validated in the U.S. market to reduce trial-and-error costs. The criterion for deciding to enter is not whether a policy exists, but whether it can actually be executed. Whether there are clear laws, guidelines, and licensing regimes, and whether market infrastructure (custody, settlement, disclosure) is being built simultaneously—these are the factors that distinguish what is commercially viable now from what is not.

Executable phase (Singapore MAS, Hong Kong SFC/HKMA, Japan FSA, UAE ADGM/VARA): Clear licensing regimes and market infrastructure are already in place, and commercialization can begin immediately. Representative areas include licensed stablecoin payments and spot ETFs. The risk here is delay, not entry. Institutions that enter first can lock in operational track records and liquidity partners early; latecomers will pay the price of the gap.

Transitional phase (South Korea FSC/FSS, Thailand SEC, Malaysia SC, India partial regulation): Policy direction is clear, but detailed rules and licensing requirements are not yet finalized. Representative areas include tokenized stocks, stablecoins, STO secondary markets, and digital asset market structure laws. What is needed now is not full commercialization, but setting up a structure that can immediately translate into commercial operations once regulatory confirmation arrives. South Korean institutions are in this phase. Waiting until regulatory confirmation is finalized before starting preparations is too late, because institutions that have already arranged licensing, systems, partners, and internal compliance will not start from the same starting line as those that have not. For institutions where domestic regulatory progress is slow, the offshore path is an effective alternative: establish an entity in a jurisdiction with a complete framework, such as Singapore or the UAE, conduct pilot operations, and accumulate compliance systems and counterparty networks, then transfer capabilities back home when domestic regulations are ready.

Exploratory phase (Indonesia, Vietnam, certain areas of the Philippines, and other emerging markets): Legal definitions, asset classifications, and investor protection standards are unclear, and jurisdictional boundaries between regulators have not been clarified. Efforts should focus on small-scale experimentation to accumulate technology and market data, maintaining the ability to scale rapidly once standards and regulatory direction are confirmed. In a phase where asset classification is not even established, betting resources on one side is itself the greatest risk.

8. Conclusion: The window is opening, but it is uncertain how long it will last

Internet Capital Markets are no longer a concept but a reality in operation. Global institutions with diverse objectives, such as J.P. Morgan, State Street, and Franklin Templeton, are simultaneously choosing Solana, not out of preference, but because it meets their respective technical and structural needs: institutional compliance capabilities embedded within the asset itself (Token-2022), a throughput track record tested under extreme traffic and sudden market volatility, and a complete ecosystem accumulated within a single ecosystem, ranging from Washington policy engagement to real-time settlement and clearing infrastructure.

These three points are not a judgment that one infrastructure is superior to another, but an observation of where institutional capital is actually converging. Validation is not reflected in price, but in who has placed what where.

The variable for Asian institutions is no longer "whether to enter," but the sequence and entry point. Reference cases have been validated, and standards have not yet been solidified. This interval—"validation completed but standards not yet solidified"—is precisely the window available to fast followers. How long it will remain open remains uncertain.

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