By Arthur Firstov, Chief Business Officer, Mercuryo

Last month, Baillie Gifford, the 118-year-old, Edinburgh-based investment firm managing roughly £286 billion, did something no UK regulated fund manager had done before – it launched a bond fund that lives entirely onchain. The Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund (BAGEY) is the fund itself, rather than a token wrapped around an existing product. The blockchain is the register of record, issued natively on both Solana and Ethereum, with BNY handling custody and tokenization and NatWest acting as depositary. For an industry that has spent years arguing about whether institutions would ever trust public blockchains with real assets, that question is now answered.

BAGEY serves as a marker of a broader shift already visible in the network’s numbers. Solana’s real-world asset value passed $3 billion in June, a new high, while cumulative tokenized-stock volume crossed $10 billion and daily tokenized-equity volume hit a record $683 million. Backpack Securities listed tokenized SpaceX shares on Solana on the company’s IPO day. Institutional capital is increasingly adopting Solana as its primary settlement infrastructure, moving beyond the era of speculative yield-chasing.

The Technical Case Institutions Are Actually Betting On

That confidence tracks real protocol progress. Solana’s path toward the Alpenglow upgrade targets sub-second, roughly 150-millisecond finality, which matters enormously for anything resembling institutional settlement, where waiting on confirmations is a cost, not a curiosity. Separately, SIMD-0266, the network’s P-Token standard, is designed to cut the computational cost of token transfers by 95 to 98 percent, and moved onto testnet earlier this year with mainnet deployment targeted for later in 2026. And in March, the Solana Foundation launched the Solana Developer Platform, an API layer that brings together more than 20 infrastructure providers under three modules covering issuance, payments, and trading, with Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union named as early users.

Designed for banks, card networks, and fund managers, this infrastructure allows seamless integration with Solana, effectively abstracting away the complexity of the underlying chain. That’s precisely the audience Baillie Gifford represents, and precisely why the fund landed where it did.

The Builders Are Already Here

The infrastructure story tends to dominate headlines, but the builder story is arguably the more important one. Colosseum’s Solana Frontier Hackathon closed in May as the largest crypto hackathon on record by submissions: more than 10,000 participants from over 150 countries, 2,857 final projects, and $2.5 million in venture funding earmarked for the next accelerator cohort. This is the pipeline of startups that will define the next phase of the Solana ecosystem, in payments, RWA tooling, and consumer finance.

But a hackathon win, or even a genuinely good product, doesn’t solve the persistent friction point these teams encounter, specifically the difficulty of moving liquidity between traditional bank accounts and the onchain ecosystem. A startup can build the most technically elegant lending market or payments rail on Solana and still stall at the same point every previous cycle stalled, the moment a user has to convert a bank balance into onchain liquidity, or convert it back.

On-Ramps: The Missing Piece for New Solana Startups

Every one of the 2,857 teams that came out of Colosseum’s hackathon faces the same early decision: how does a new user actually get funds into the product. DeFi protocols, payments apps, and swap platforms must treat that functionality as the front door rather than a downstream feature. Without a fast, compliant way to turn cash into SOL, USDC, or whatever asset the app runs on, the rest of the product never gets tested, because users never get past the first screen.

This is increasingly something founders build for on day one rather than bolt on later. Newer Solana-native platforms, such as the swap exchange Swapter, are examples of the growing number of applications that need fiat-to-crypto conversion wired directly into the product rather than sending users elsewhere to buy crypto first. On-ramp integration is becoming table stakes for any Solana startup that wants retail users, not an optional add-on to revisit after launch.

This is precisely where Mercuryo’s work sits: giving Solana-native startups, whether a swap platform, a DeFi protocol, or a consumer wallet, an embeddable on-ramp and off-ramp they can integrate directly, rather than building the compliance, KYC, and banking relationships from scratch. For a small team focused on its core product, that’s the difference between onboarding paying users within weeks and spending months on licensing and banking integration before a single transaction clears.

Liquidity Without Access Is Just a Number

This is also true at the top of the market. Standard Chartered has projected the tokenized real-world asset market could reach $2 trillion by 2028, and BAGEY is an early, credible proof point of that trajectory. But a tokenized bond fund is only useful to an investor if its yield can eventually settle into an operating account, and a new Solana startup’s onchain treasury is only useful if it can pay a supplier, a contractor, or a vendor in the currency they actually use. The technical achievement of moving assets onchain and the commercial achievement of moving value off it again are two different problems, and the industry has historically been much better at solving the first than the second.

That same on-ramp and off-ramp logic scales up as well as down. The compliant, regulated banking and card rails that let a new Solana startup onboard its first users are the same infrastructure that lets a fund like BAGEY eventually settle yield into an investor’s account. It’s less glamorous than a headline product launch, but it’s the layer that determines whether all this liquidity and all this institutional credibility actually reaches the people it’s meant for.

The Next Constraint Is Access, Not Infrastructure

Solana has spent the last year answering the technical and institutional questions: can it settle fast enough, can it handle regulated assets, will serious capital trust it. BAGEY, alongside the network’s throughput and tokenization upgrades, answers all three. The open question now is a distribution one: as thousands of new teams come out of programs like Colosseum’s accelerator, and as institutional products like BAGEY deepen the pool of onchain liquidity, which of them will actually be able to move that liquidity to and from the real economy.

That’s the infrastructure question worth paying attention to this year. The chains, the funds, and the founders that treat on- and off-ramp access as core infrastructure, rather than an afterthought bolted on before launch, will be the ones that convert Solana’s institutional moment into durable, everyday utility.