R3 Taps Solana for Onchain Finance
In May, R3—a company with a decade-long track record building infrastructure for financial heavyweights like HSBC and the Swiss National Bank—announced a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation at the Solana Accelerate conference. This move follows R3’s recent shift in focus: about a year ago, the firm began refocusing its efforts on moving traditional assets fully onchain, after conducting a comprehensive review of various blockchain platforms. The collaboration aims to bring institutional-grade asset tokenization to Solana, leveraging R3’s Corda platform, which already supports over $10 billion in assets.
Tokenization—the process of representing real-world assets like bonds or equities as digital tokens—has become a key use case attracting banks and other financial institutions to blockchain. For R3, the goal is ambitious: since May, the company has set its sights on tokenizing the next trillion dollars of assets and making them accessible to investors directly onchain. This partnership places Solana in direct competition with Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks, which have historically dominated institutional DeFi activity.
Solana ETF Inflows Beat BTC, ETH
While institutional infrastructure is taking shape behind the scenes, Solana's market-facing products are also drawing attention. Over the past week, Solana ETFs registered more than $11 million in net inflows—outpacing both Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs combined during the same period. Notably, Fidelity's Solana ETF (FSOL) saw a single-day inflow of $9.85 million, bringing FSOL's total cumulative inflows to approximately $148 million. By comparison, Bitcoin ETFs experienced an outflow of $38.53 million and Ethereum ETFs saw a decline of $64.86 million.
As a result, Solana ETFs now hold a total net asset value of $1.08 billion and maintain a net asset ratio of 1.50%. Despite these strong inflows, SOL’s price dropped to $127 and its Relative Strength Index (RSI)—a measure used to gauge momentum—fell to 39.35, indicating waning trader enthusiasm even as institutional money enters the space.
On paper, surging ETF inflows might signal growing confidence in Solana, but price action tells a more complicated story.
Urgent Patch Highlights Network’s Fragility
On January 11, only 18% of stake had migrated to Agave v3.0.14 despite urgent warnings from maintainers.
Solana’s technical underpinnings faced scrutiny this month after maintainers labeled an upgrade to validator software “urgent” due to critical vulnerabilities. The Agave v3.0.14 release addressed flaws that could have allowed attackers to stall the network—a risk that became public when only a small fraction of validators had updated by January 11. Anza, the team responsible for Agave development, published a summary on January 16 explaining why rapid adoption was necessary to secure Mainnet Beta validators.
The Solana Foundation responded by tightening delegation criteria: validators must now run specific software versions (Agave 3.0.14 or Frankendancer 0.808.30014) to receive delegated stake from the Foundation itself. As Solana operates under proof-of-stake consensus—where validators’ voting power depends on staked SOL—this policy directly impacts network security and decentralization.
DeFi TVL Surges Amid ETF Momentum
Despite recent security concerns and muted price movement, activity on Solana’s decentralized exchanges (DEXs) remains robust. According to coingape.com, Solana recorded $4.4 billion in DEX trading volume within just 24 hours—a figure that far surpasses other blockchains during that period (which managed only $1.6 billion). This surge coincides with over $9 billion locked in DeFi protocols across the network, positioning Solana as one of the largest ecosystems outside Ethereum and its scaling solutions.
It’s uncertain whether this momentum will persist if technical vulnerabilities continue surfacing or if price weakness deepens further.
The Final Word
- •In May, R3 partnered with the Solana Foundation to bring institutional asset tokenization onchain via the Corda platform, which supports $10 billion+ in assets.
- •Over the past week, Solana ETFs saw $11 million net inflows, surpassing combined Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF inflows for the same period.
- •As of now, Solana ETFs have a total net asset value of $1.08 billion and a net asset ratio of 1.50%.
Key risks to monitor
If Solana validators fail to upgrade promptly to Agave v3.0.14—an “urgent” release with critical security patches announced by the Solana Status account and highlighted by Anza on January 16—validators risk losing delegated stake under the Solana Foundation’s updated criteria, which could immediately impact network security and block production.