Solana Emerges as Autobahn for Money in Institutional Finance, Korean Foundation Chief Says

Solana’s Korean director highlights its speed, low costs, and tokenization potential as it builds institutional rails for stablecoins and tokenized assets.

Rich by Coin

2026-01-19

Solana is emerging as a preferred blockchain platform for stablecoin payments and tokenized financial assets, offering a high-speed, low-cost backbone for next-generation finance. Lee Sung-san, the Korean director of the Solana Foundation, says Solana can be likened to an autobahn for money, optimized for stablecoin transfers, payments, remittances and tokenization. The Solana Foundation is a nonprofit that supports development and global adoption of the Solana blockchain, while the protocol itself remains open source and maintained by a global developer community.

Solana currently ranks among the world’s top five digital assets by market capitalization excluding stablecoins, with a valuation around $83 billion as of mid-January. The network has strengthened its role by supporting a broad range of tokenized assets, including the USDC stablecoin and tokenized money market funds such as Benji and Acred. Acred combines tokenized credit products with DeFi protocols, offering about 4–5% returns from US Treasury yields and roughly another 4% from DeFi strategies, delivering post-fee returns near 8%.

Speed and cost efficiency are central to Solana’s appeal for institutions. Transactions are included in blocks in about 0.4 seconds, and the network handles roughly 1,295 transactions per second, with average fees around $0.0013 per transaction. By comparison, Ethereum’s average fee sits around $0.24, and traditional financial actors are gradually moving toward Solana for cost reasons.

Institutional interest is rising as tokenization and on-chain finance expand; Solana aims to be more than a crypto network, positioning itself as core infrastructure for institutional-grade digital finance. Last month JPMorgan issued a US short-term commercial paper on Solana and completed settlement using a delivery-versus-payment structure, a milestone in real-world adoption. In asset management, major firms such as Franklin Templeton and Apollo have issued tokenized funds on Solana, illustrating the platform’s expanding role in traditional finance.