Headline: Solana’s next act: less hype, more finance — Backpack CEO says the network is maturing into on-chain market infrastructure
Solana’s latest chapter is trading flashy memecoin frenzies for a quieter, more deliberate focus on financial infrastructure — and that may be exactly the point.
Armani Ferrante, CEO of crypto exchange Backpack, told CoinDesk that over the past year the Solana ecosystem has shifted away from the NFT-, gaming- and social-token experiments that dominated earlier cycles, and toward decentralized finance, trading and payments. Ferrante, who will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, framed the change not as a loss of momentum but as a sign of maturation.
“People are really starting to think about blockchains as a new kind of financial infrastructure,” he said. “It’s less about NFTs, less about random moonshot-like games, and much more about finance.”
That recalibration has made Solana seem subdued to some outside observers, but Ferrante argues the network is intentionally building for a different class of use cases: high-throughput on-chain trading, market structure and settlement — what some call “internet capital markets.” The emphasis is on reliable, low-latency settlement rails that can support the demands of trading and payments at scale.
The pivot is happening against a backdrop of mixed crypto sentiment. While retail-driven price action has been muted and crypto-native investors cautious, Ferrante says institutional interest is stronger than ever. He points to momentum around tokenization, stablecoins and on-chain settlement as proof that Wall Street is increasingly bullish on blockchain primitives.
For Ferrante, the long-term value of Solana — and of blockchains in general — lies in their ability to serve as neutral settlement layers. In that vision, securities, derivatives and other assets become standardized tokens that move seamlessly across platforms rather than sitting in siloed databases. “A token is just a canonical, agreed-upon ledger entry for who owns something,” he said. “That concept applies everywhere.”
But adoption of that model, he warned, hinges on regulatory integration rather than regulatory avoidance. As crypto infrastructure becomes embedded in mainstream finance, compliance and legal clarity are not optional; they’re prerequisites for real-world use. “What maturity actually means is the real world,” Ferrante said. “And the real world isn’t a free-for-all.”
Ferrante’s pitch: Solana is tolerating less hype now because it’s building the plumbing that will matter when more of global finance goes on-chain. If that bet pays off, the current quiet could be the groundwork for a far bigger, institutional-grade market infrastructure. Related reading: Ethereum and Solana set the stage for 2026’s DeFi reboot.
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