Solana’s stablecoin payments rail gains ground as ETF flows turn mixed
Solana's card-based stablecoin payments hit $94m as speculative trading cools, even as US spot ETFs see net outflows.
Solana’s underlying market structure is shifting away from speculative trading and toward institutional payments infrastructure, even as the token itself struggled for direction this week and newly launched US spot exchange-traded funds recorded net outflows.
SOL traded between roughly $73 and $78 through the week, changing hands near $73.73 on CoinMarketCap as of Friday, down 2.79% on the day. Quoted prices diverged unusually widely across venues — CoinGecko showed the token near $77.52 and Stocktwits closer to $78.18 — a gap of almost 5% that analysts typically associate with thinning leveraged positioning and increasingly fragmented liquidity across offshore exchanges. Twenty-four hour turnover remained substantial at roughly $1.54 billion.
Stablecoin payments rail gathers pace
The more significant development sits away from the spot price. Top-ups and payments processed through Solana-based stablecoin card rails reached a record $94.32 million in May, lifting the network’s share of the broader stablecoin payments market to 21%, up from roughly 5% a year earlier — a more than fourfold increase in twelve months.
Professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal has accepted its first client payment settled on Solana in USD Coin, a notable example of blockchain rails entering conventional corporate billing workflows. Separately, Privy, the wallet infrastructure business owned by Stripe, has partnered with Jito Labs on a tool named “FullSend”, designed to improve the reliability with which Privy-linked wallet transactions land in blocks, reducing perceived delays for end users.
Against that, activity linked to speculative trading has visibly retreated. Fees generated by Solana-based decentralised exchanges fell more than 63% over the past 30 days, consistent with a slowdown in meme-coin-driven turnover. Overall on-chain transaction volume over the same period, however, more than doubled compared with levels recorded on 1 January, pointing to a compositional shift toward payments, enterprise settlement and infrastructure-heavy decentralised finance rather than a simple decline in network usage.
Alpenglow upgrade targets institutional-grade finality
Solana’s technical roadmap appears designed to reinforce that transition. Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has described the planned “Alpenglow” consensus redesign as one of the most consequential protocol changes in the network’s history. The upgrade would replace Proof of History and Tower BFT with new components labelled “Votor” and “Rotor”, intended to cut transaction finality to roughly 150 milliseconds and reduce processing delays during periods of network congestion.
Validator signalling has been strongly supportive, with approval running at around 98%, and mainnet activation is targeted for the third quarter of 2026. The timing coincides with weekly non-vote transaction counts surpassing one billion and active wallets approaching a yearly peak of roughly seven million, metrics that underpin Solana’s case for handling heavier real-world payment and financial-application loads without compromising validator decentralisation.
ETF flows turn mixed as tokenisation push continues
Institutional exposure to Solana has grown alongside the payments story, though near-term fund flows have not moved in one direction. Combined assets across US spot Solana ETFs, including Bitwise’s BSOL and Fidelity’s FSOL, have surpassed $1 billion since launch, and Morgan Stanley has been reported to be preparing a separate Solana trust product. Bitwise’s fund posted a daily net inflow of $2.64 million at one point, according to CoinGecko data.
More recently, the combined spot Solana ETF complex recorded net outflows of about $8.6 million, reflecting a broader risk-off tone tied to macro uncertainty. Forbes reported SOL dipping intraday to around $73.53, down as much as 3.8% at the session low, mirroring a wider pullback across digital assets.
Longer-term institutional interest continues to build regardless. Galaxy Digital has previously partnered with Superstate to tokenise SEC-registered common stock directly onto Solana, with the aim of achieving near-instant settlement on a public blockchain — an early test case for whether regulated securities infrastructure can migrate onto permissionless networks without triggering fresh regulatory friction.
Read more: Raydium builds gated liquidity pools on Solana to court regulated asset flows
