On October 22, 2026, J.P. Morgan Asset Management enabled its tokenized money market funds on Solana: MONY, a private fund, and JLTXX, a registered government debt fund designed for the reserves required under the United States’ GENIUS Act. Only approved addresses can hold them, and the registry of ownership remains off-chain. Three days earlier, the same bank had brought JPM Coin, its tokenized deposit, to Ethereum, not to Solana.
A quick read might suggest the big banks are moving to Solana. But among the institutions we reviewed, JPMorgan is the only globally systemically important bank with a meaningful product on Solana’s public network (Société Générale has less than $4 million there in its stablecoins), and even JPMorgan keeps its own money on other chains. The ones actually operating on Solana are payment networks, asset managers, and small US banks.
Our thesis
Banks didn’t adopt Solana. They adopted multichain distribution, and Solana “won the storefront.” They put their products there (funds, stablecoins, card settlement) because that’s where the buyers and the crypto-native treasuries already are. Their money (tokenized deposits, consortium stablecoins) and their control (validators, default settings) go to chains they operate themselves or in partnership. That gap between adoption and control is the narrative tension the industry still hasn’t figured out how to tell.
Summary
- Live on Solana: tokenized funds from JPMorgan and BlackRock, PayPal’s PYUSD, Western Union’s USDPT, and Visa’s settlement in USDC with two small banks.
- Only announced or piloting: Mastercard, Citi (on a private chain), and community banks in Texas (using Solana’s software, outside its public network).
- No production on Solana: Santander, BBVA, Itaú, Nubank, and Fidelity.
- Solana holds $15.6 billion in stablecoins versus Ethereum’s $143.3 billion (DefiLlama, October 22).
- The competition that matters is no longer Solana versus Ethereum, but neutral public chains versus corporate chains like Tempo (Stripe), Arc (Circle), and Canton.
Adoption arrived, but not in the shape that was promised
Back in May we argued that crypto won the adoption argument but lost the story that drove it: institutional legitimacy shortened the distance between crypto and the financial system it had defined itself against, leaving a narrative vacuum. Banks’ arrival on Solana is a good case for measuring that vacuum against data, because it’s the story the industry itself tells as a victory.
The Solana Foundation describes the network as “the leading venue for tokenized real-world assets,” in the announcement of its settlement program on October 5. The aggregate numbers tell a different story: according to rwa.xyz, as of October 22, Ethereum has $16.49 billion in distributed tokenized assets (not counting stablecoins), and Solana has $4.79 billion, in third place behind BNB Chain. Solana does lead in specific products, which opens up interesting angles.
What’s in production, what’s piloting, and what’s only been announced
The table below summarizes the status of each institution as of October 22, 2026. “Live” means in production on Solana’s public network; figures are on-chain balances with their source noted.
| Institution | Status on Solana | What’s there | On other chains |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPMorgan Asset Management | Live since October 22 | MONY and JLTXX funds, approved addresses only | First launched on Ethereum |
| JPMorgan (markets) | A single transaction | $50 million commercial paper for Galaxy, December 2025 | We found no second issuance |
| JPMorgan Kinexys | Not on Solana | JPM Coin on Base and Ethereum; Canton planned | Its own private network |
| Visa | Live, still called a pilot | USDC settlement with Cross River and Lead Bank | Nine chains, no per-chain breakdown |
| Mastercard | Announced | Stablecoin settlement across eight chains, including Solana | No specific Solana volume |
| BlackRock (BUIDL) | Live | $872 million of $2.17 billion, its largest chain (rwa.xyz) | Avalanche, Ethereum |
| PayPal (PYUSD) | Live | $730 million of $2.94 billion (DefiLlama) | Ethereum, $1.85 billion |
| Western Union (USDPT) | Live, Solana only | About $21 million in circulation (DefiLlama) | None |
| Stripe and Bridge (OUSD) | Live, secondary | $83 million of $836 million (DefiLlama) | Tempo, $529 million |
| Société Générale (SG-FORGE) | Live, marginal | $1.7 million in EURCV and $2 million in USDCV | Ethereum, XRPL, Stellar |
| Citi | Proof of concept on a private chain | Tokenized bill of exchange with simulated data | Proprietary infrastructure |
| Texas community banks | Pilot using Solana’s software, outside its public network | Tokenized deposits | Private environment |
| Santander, BBVA, Itaú, Nubank, Fidelity | No production | Some offer SOL token trading | Ethereum, consortiums, private networks |
JPMorgan: a vendor on Solana, owner elsewhere
JPMorgan is the big bank most deeply involved in Solana, which makes it the clearest example of the distinction. In December 2025 it structured a $50 million commercial paper issuance for Galaxy, bought by Coinbase and Franklin Templeton and settled in USDC. According to the Solana Foundation, which launched its delivery-versus-payment program in October, JPMorgan contributed its settlement expertise to the design. And since October 22 it has been selling its money market funds on the network.
The funds also show how the bank is approaching this: a permissioned asset on top of a permissionless chain. Anyone can use Solana, but only addresses approved by the fund can hold MONY or JLTXX, and the official ownership registry is kept off-chain by the fund’s transfer agent, according to the supplement filed with the SEC. The public network supplies buyers and liquidity; the rules remain the issuer’s.
All of that is JPMorgan selling products where the buyers are. Its own money takes a different path: JPM Coin is on Base and Ethereum, with a phased rollout on Canton planned for 2026, according to the product page. Kinexys, its payments platform, processes an average of $7 billion a day, according to the bank’s internal data.
Paul Przybylski, global head of digital and tokenized assets product at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, put it plainly in the October 22 announcement: “Our clients operate across more than one network, and their liquidity should too.” That’s multichain distribution, not a move to a new network.
The GENIUS Act reinforces that role. The OCC, the federal banking regulator under the US Treasury Department, published its implementing rule on October 21, effective January 18, 2027. JLTXX is designed for stablecoin issuers to park their reserves there. A bank that sells reserves to issuers has reason to be on whatever chain those issuers live on, Solana included, without needing to bet on any one of them.
Visa and Mastercard: settling above the chains
In December 2025 Visa launched USDC settlement in the United States, with Cross River and Lead Bank operating on Solana. In April 2026 it added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo to Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Stellar: nine chains in total. According to Visa, cited by The Block in September, its stablecoin settlement now runs at an annualized pace above $20 billion.
We don’t know what share of that volume runs through Solana, because Visa doesn’t publish it. It’s worth not confusing it with another figure making the rounds: the 35.5% of adjusted stablecoin volume that Solana claimed in February 2026, based on Allium data, is its share of the entire market’s volume, not of Visa’s settlement. The next chance to get that number is Visa’s earnings report on October 27.
Rubail Birwadker, of Visa, laid out the strategy in the April announcement: its partners are building “in a multichain world” and trust Visa as a “common settlement layer” across all of them. Visa isn’t picking a chain; it’s positioning itself above them. It also validates on Arc and Tempo, two corporate-operated chains.
Mastercard announced in June settlement with six stablecoins across eight chains, Solana among them, with partners in the US and Latin America like ARQ (formerly DolarApp). The announcement describes plans. We found no Solana-specific volume.
BUIDL and PYUSD: where Solana does win
BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized fund with Securitize, is the strongest case in Solana’s favor. According to rwa.xyz, as of October 22 it held $872 million of its $2.17 billion on Solana, more than on Avalanche ($482 million) or Ethereum (about $423 million).
Two caveats. BUIDL has 101 holders, so a handful of clients can shift the split. And the drop on Ethereum wasn’t a migration: OnChain Benchmark attributes September’s 54% decline to token burns, not transfers to Solana.
PYUSD, PayPal’s stablecoin issued by Paxos, has about a quarter of its supply on Solana: $730 million of $2.94 billion (DefiLlama). USDG, from Paxos’s Global Dollar Network, is another coin where Solana outpaces Ethereum, with $629 million versus $320 million. Solana is winning share within multichain products. It isn’t winning the choice of chain.
Western Union: the exclusive bet, still small
Western Union is the only major traditional company we reviewed that went all in on Solana alone. It launched USDPT in May, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, rolling out in Bolivia and the Philippines. On October 13, Bitso listed it for retail customers in Mexico, according to CriptoNoticias, and Western Union agents with a Bitso Business account can convert it.
Scale hasn’t caught up yet: about $21 million in circulation as of October 22 (DefiLlama). Treasury settlement with agents, which would be the highest-volume use case, is “under development,” according to the company. It’s the clearest bet on Solana among incumbents and, for now, one of the smallest.
Stripe and Tempo: the owner of the storefront builds its own street
OUSD, the Open Standard stablecoin (backed by Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa) issued by Bridge, launched on September 30 on Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo. Stripe supports Solana for payments and transfers. But Tempo, the chain Stripe is building with Paradigm, is its default option, and the numbers reflect that: of OUSD’s $836 million, $529 million sits on Tempo and $83 million on Solana (DefiLlama, October 22).
This is the structural risk for Solana. The companies that decide the default option for millions of merchants own chains that compete with it.
Solana’s engine, without Solana’s chain
The two cases most often cited as “banks on Solana” don’t actually happen on its public network.
Citi’s report on supply chain financing describes a proof of concept with PwC and Solana that tokenized a bill of exchange and simulated its full lifecycle. The bank itself clarifies, on pages 72 to 74, that the exercise “used a private or permissioned blockchain and did not involve client participation,” with synthetic data. The Solana publication describing a cycle executed “on Solana” overstates what Citi actually reported. Citi, in fact, concludes that it will matter for solutions to run on public infrastructure.
In Texas, the Independent Bankers Association of Texas (IBAT) showed, in a testing environment in September, tokenized deposits from community banks running on Solstice, built by Rimark, one of three vendors it selected: a permissioned Solana environment with its own validators and ledger. Rimark presents it as having “no dependence on the public chain or on Solana’s token.” It’s the cleanest case of banks using Solana’s technology, and it exposes a tension the network’s narrative tends to avoid: the software can win even where the chain and its token aren’t involved.
Which Solana features are actually being used
The table below separates the features issuers are actually using from the ones that only show up in slide decks.
| Feature | What it’s for | Who uses it | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Token Extensions (freeze, claw back, rules on every transfer) | Issuer control and regulatory compliance | PYUSD, BUIDL on Solana | In use |
| Delivery-versus-payment program | Atomic settlement of asset against payment | JPMorgan advised; no named production user | Audited, ahead of its production release |
| Confidential transfers | Encrypted balances and amounts | We found no bank using them | Reactivated on the network in mid-2026 |
| Permissioned environments | Private network running Solana’s engine | Texas bank pilot | Pilot |
What issuers are choosing today are compliance controls, not privacy or atomic settlement. That fits with a distribution-oriented use case: putting a regulated product in front of buyers, with the ability to freeze it if needed.
The real fight: neutral chains versus incumbent chains
The competition that matters to a decision-maker is no longer Solana versus Ethereum. It’s neutral public chains versus corporate-operated chains, whose validators are the very same incumbents.
| Chain | Who’s there | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Tempo (Stripe and Paradigm) | Stripe’s default for OUSD; Visa validates | Already surpasses Solana in OUSD |
| Arc (Circle) | Validated by BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa, among others; banks like BNY, BTG Pactual, HSBC, Société Générale | Circle describes it as secured by “the institutions that run the world’s financial infrastructure” |
| Canton | DTCC’s tokenization service; JPM Coin planned; Visa and Mastercard | Privacy by design for capital markets |
| Ethereum and Base | JPM Coin, Fidelity’s stablecoin, most of EURCV | Liquidity depth |
Bank consortium currencies point in the same direction. Qivalis, the euro stablecoin from a consortium of European banks that includes BBVA, will launch on Ethereum: “We’re going to launch on Ethereum,” its CEO, Jan-Oliver Sell, told Future of Finance, adding that they’re also evaluating permissioned chains. The 21-institution consortium co-led by Santander, with a dollar stablecoin planned for the first half of 2027, hasn’t announced which chain it will use.
This is where the narrative tension comes into sharpest focus. The original promise of public chains was infrastructure no one controls. The institutional adoption that arrived in 2026 uses those chains for distribution, while reserving control for networks where the incumbents hold the votes. For Solana, the story shifts from “the chain banks are moving to” to “the busiest storefront in a market whose storefronts the incumbents are starting to build for themselves.” Neither phrase amounts to a defeat, but only the second one describes what’s actually happening.
Within Solana’s own community, this splits interests that the adoption narrative treats as one and the same. Those building applications benefit from regulated dollars arriving on the network, whoever brings them. Those betting on the token care whether the activity actually happens on the public chain. The Texas case shows those two things can diverge. And within the same network, two worlds coexist that barely touch: the memecoins and retail speculation that made Solana popular, and BUIDL, with 101 holders across all its chains, operating only from approved addresses. It’s the question we raised back in May: whether the industry will end up split between an ideological crypto ecosystem and a traditional finance one. On Solana, for now, they share the same chain.
What changes for Latin America
For a CTO or a fund in the region, the choice of chain is already a distribution decision made by counterparties: issuers working with Visa and Mastercard, Stripe, Bitso, Western Union agents. Their tools are multichain, so the practical question is where the liquidity and the partners are, not which technology is better.
Three concrete data points. Peso-denominated coins aren’t on Solana: MXNB, Bitso’s Mexican peso stablecoin, runs on Arbitrum and Ethereum, according to the company itself. The region’s large banks offer SOL token trading (Itaú through its íon app, BTG through Mynt), not products on the network, and BTG Pactual is listed as a bank on Arc. And access to Solana’s dollars comes through fintechs and networks: Bitso with USDPT and, once it materializes, Mastercard’s announced settlement with partners like ARQ.
If you want the payments angle, with regional volumes and case studies, we covered it in how stablecoins went from an asset to payments infrastructure in Latin America. There we already showed that Tron, not Solana, moved the bulk of stablecoin payments between January and September, according to Allium.
What would change our mind?
Our thesis would weaken with any of these signals, which we’ll be tracking through the first half of 2027:
- A tokenized deposit from a major bank, or the 21-institution consortium’s currency, launching natively on Solana.
- Visa publishing a per-chain breakdown showing Solana accounting for most of its settlement.
- A second debt issuance structured by JPMorgan on Solana, turning the Galaxy deal into an actual market.
- USDPT approaching $500 million in circulation.
- Announcements at Breakpoint, Solana’s November conference, putting banks’ own money (not third-party products) on the public network.
The question that remains open isn’t technical. It’s who gets to define what a public chain is for. In a May newsletter, we called narrative capital the power of a group to set the terms of a conversation: what’s desirable, what matters, and what words are used to discuss it. Today that capital is being accumulated by JPMorgan and Visa, who in their announcements describe Solana as just one more network in a multichain world, and by Stripe, which chose its own chain as the default option. If the Solana community keeps telling the story of banks’ arrival as a migration, the institutions themselves will keep correcting it with every press release.
Disclosures
- Bitso, which appears in this report as a distributor in Mexico, was a client of Postdigitalist’s studio.
- All content produced by Postdigitalist Research is an editorial repackaging of internal research. The entire process is led by a human.