Solana

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Happy 6th birthday Solana fam. They said quit. The builders stayed. They said it’s dead. The code persisted. They said move on. The network’s never been stronger. Just one more hard quarter.

“Every single major payments platform, every company with a huge cross-border payments infrastructure is all operating and studying what’s going on with stablecoins. What’s changed since the Genius Act got signed last year is you’re seeing a new rush of companies that have said, hey, we’ve studied this for ages. Now we better understand the use case, we understand the technology and the regulatory perimeters here. So Meta is one of the ones that’s doing this.” – Amira Valliani, Head of Payments Growth at the Solana Foundation

“What [banks] realized with the passage of Genius is that, ‘Oh, wow, this is a technology that’s here. It’s an industry that’s politically incredibly powerful, and this is not a passing fad. This is something that’s gonna stay.’ And I think even a year ago when we were deep in the Genius Act negotiations in Washington, the banks weren’t really anywhere to be found. Now, obviously, they realize that stablecoins are a thing. They’re not going away. They have been blessed by legislation and they’re starting to get worried from a competitive perspective. I do think in the short term that that is a challenge, but I think ultimately that banks and community banks have a ton of opportunities with stablecoins and that they will come around to see that this isn’t the end of the world for them.” –Kristin Smith, President of the Solana Policy Institute on the Coinage podcast

Senator Bernie Moreno explains the plan to pass the Clarity Act by July 4th: “I feel confident that we’ll get a markup out of the Senate next week. By the way, for your people who are watching, a “markup” means we voted out of committee. And once that happens, it’s live rounds on the Senate floor. We have to tie it in with the agriculture bill that passed already. We have to do some work with Judiciary and Ethics. And then package the whole bill up as a Senate bill and then vote on it probably in June. Then when we pass it, it goes to the House. They pass it as is. And then it goes to the president to be signed into law. And let the innovations begin.” – Senator Bernie Moreno with Kristin Smith, President of the Solana Policy Institute at @Coindesk Consensus 2026

Lily Liu explains why Visa, Western Union, and Fiserv chose to integrate with Solana: “You need performance, fast and cheap, that’s really non-negotiable. You do need to have a secure, actually decentralized, and sort of credibly neutral technological layer. You also have to have a developer community, and then also a robust set of assets and applications. Using that infrastructure, so you have this whole ecosystem around these financial rails. And I think that was, that became fairly obvious to keen observers of this ecosystem as early as 2023... What people are looking for, is they’re looking for technology, financial rails, that are just financial rails, that are there to support their business rather than potentially compete with their business. And fast, cheap is a no-brainer for payments. But then also comes with a whole ecosystem of builders, of applications, a diversity of assets, whose ultimately finance is about having a network effect. And you have to kind of bring that whole network of talent and capital together, and that’s something that we’ve been doing and will continue to do.” – Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation at @Coindesk Consensus 2026

If Accelerate USA was a movie, what kind of movie is it?

Toly on how he got lucky with his early hires at Solana: “I was pretty lucky that a lot of the folks that I worked with at Qualcomm were kind of itching to go do something else. And it was very serendipitous, because these are folks with like 10+ years experience in really, really low level hard operating systems or protocols. Like one of the folks that worked on the Solana protocol literally worked on the LTE spec. So people that have like really in depth understanding of networks and operating systems, GPUs, CPUs, like low level chips. The pitch that I gave to them was like, ‘You’re going to go get a different job anyways, you’re kind of bored here. So you could do this as like a sabbatical, take six months, we’ll see where we end up.’ And I was able to hire like basically experts in their field that I knew really well, and we were able to hit the ground running and build a really, I think, state of the art network that proved to be ahead of all our competitors at launch by 10 miles at least.” – @solanafounder Anatoly Yakovenko on the New Economies podcast with @ollieforsyth

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“Solana has grown RWAs on chain 1000% since January of last year. So we’re right up in the top couple chains in terms of TVL. We’re seeing everything from JP Morgan – who’s starting to settle some transaction on Solana, Visa, Western Union just launched a stablecoin. We’re also seeing neobanks and fintechs and technology companies starting to do things on Solana. Last week, Meta announced creator payouts would be in Stablecoins, and those Stablecoins are Solana-based in Colombia and the Philippines. So yeah, I think you’re seeing payments traction, you’re seeing RWAs, treasury funds onchain. Solana is really the home for everything, every asset that you can imagine.” –Vibhu Norby, Chief Product Officer at the Solana Foundation

Collector Crypt Founder and CEO Tuomas Holmberg on why he chose to build on Solana: “I was chatting with other builders and other companies. I remember meeting the guys at Magic Eden really early, meeting the guys at @phantom really early...they were just so much more interesting and they were so much more interested in what I was building and trying to figure out ways they could help me. Not even trying to say, pay me $5,000 and I’ll help you. That’s what Polygon sounded like... When I go hang out with the monkeys and I hang out with the degen apes guys, I’m at home and I feel comfortable and that’s what I want to do. Those are more like my people and I know that my people also love trading cards and so we decided to build on Solana, it was that simple.” 🎬 @solanaxgaming podcast