 
 
Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer of the crypto asset management company Bitwise, foresees Solana becoming the Wall Street network of choice for stablecoins and tokenization.
“I think Solana is the new Wall Street,” Hougan said while speaking with Solana Labs’ Akshay Rajan on Oct. 2.
According to Hougan, the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Bank of England, along with BlackRock’s chief, have all indicated that digital assets could reshape the payments and securities markets.
They can see what is happening in the stablecoin and tokenization sector, and they know that it is going to be “enormously significant,” he said before adding, “Really important people are saying that stablecoins will reinvent payments and tokenization will reinvent stock, bond, commodity, and real estate markets.”
Hougan said that once Wall Street audiences start to evaluate how to gain exposure to the blockchain space, comparisons between various platforms inevitably follow. In that evaluation, he argued, Solana’s combination of speed, throughput, and near-instant finality makes it “extraordinarily attractive.”
 
Hougan highlighted improvements from 400 microseconds to 150 microseconds in settlement speed, noting that this makes sense to them because that’s how they like to trade.
Describing Solana as “the new Wall Street,” Hougan said the blockchain’s technical edge is resonating with market participants. He said the narrative is “really resonant” and added that “you’ll see substantial flows.”
Bullish Tailwinds Align For Solana
Digital asset treasuries centered on Solana have been scooping up SOL all year, with publicly traded firms like Forward Industries, Defi Development, and Upexi collectively holding more than $3 billion worth of the asset since the year began, according to Blockworks data.
Solana ETFs could be just around the corner, too, as investors await the SEC’s final SOL ETF decision on Oct. 10. As ZyCrypto reported late last month, top Bloomberg ETF analysts are confident a slew of spot SOL ETFs will imminently be greenlighted for trading — so confident, they’ve now estimated the odds of such approvals coming before 2025-end at a staggering 100%.
Among them are Solana ETFs from Bitwise, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, CoinShares, Grayscale Investments, Canary Capital, and VanEck — all of which filed revised S-1 registration statements with the SEC to update their existing funds’ staking provisions.
Moreover, the SEC recently told these issuers to pull their 19b-4 filings for spot ETFs based on Solana and other cryptocurrencies after the agency adopted new generic listing standards, clearing the path for October approvals.
SOL was among the top performers in a rallying crypto market on Sunday, up 1.2% to $231.98. The altcoin currently sits around 21.2% off its January all-time high of $293.31, according to CoinGecko.