Solana has started clawing its way out of a year-long bloodbath. After crashing more than 70% earlier in 2025, the token is once again rising, while both Bitcoin and Ether slow down. According to data from CoinGecko, the past two weeks have seen Solana climb about 15%, while Ether stayed flat and Bitcoin slid 4%. That gap widened over the last month: Solana jumped 30%, beating ether’s 24% rise and bitcoin’s 2% decline. The turnaround didn’t happen in a vacuum, though. VanEck filed to launch a staked Solana ETF in collaboration with Jito, a decentralized finance platform. Galaxy and Jump are trying to raise $1 billion to launch a Solana-focused treasury fund. ETF filings and tokenized assets flood Solana This renewed energy is being driven by institutional investors treating Solana like something more serious than just a quick flip. For now, Solana is only up 8% in 2025, but Bitcoin and Ether are ahead at 18% and 32%, respectively. Still, that hasn’t stopped the big players from shifting toward Solana. Matthew Sigel, who heads digital asset research at VanEck, described it as “a very rare dynamic, that Bitcoin is experiencing a 10% drawdown and Ethereum is not, and that does symbolize a structural shift in the market.” He said traditional firms like banks, brokers, and Fortune 1000 companies are starting to adopt stablecoins and plan to settle transactions using open blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. Solana’s wild ride began at the start of 2025 when it surged to a record high of $295. That run was fueled by meme coins with political themes, including the “Official Trump” token and LIBRA, the coin tied to Argentine President Javier Milei. But the hype clogged the network. By February, the meme frenzy collapsed. In April, during a broader risk-off dump, Solana got hit hard and dropped to $95, one of the lowest points this year. Institutions double down despite meme coin fallout Institutional bets on Solana never fully disappeared. The return of Donald Trump to the White House, and his pro-crypto attitude, gave some extra fuel. Austin Federa, a co-founder of DoubleZero and former strategy lead at the Solana Foundation, said : “Up until the change of administration last year it was perceived as being pretty risky for [traditional finance] companies to start engaging in serious ways with blockchain protocols. The change in tone from the SEC is pretty remarkable. [It] brought an industry that existed in a bit of a regulatory undefined space into something that is now more integrated and more holistically part of the traditional financial ecosystem.” Asset managers are circling. Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and Bitwise have all filed to launch SOL ETFs. BlackRock hasn’t filed, but it did expand its tokenized money market fund called BUIDL to the Solana network. In April, a team of former Kraken executives acquired a small software firm and rebranded it as DeFi Development, a treasury company built around Solana. The plan is to not only buy SOL but also to stake it and earn passive rewards from the network. In July, Cathie Wood’s Ark began staking SOL via a Canadian-based group called SOL Strategies. Around the same time, Galaxy started offering tokenized public shares of itself on Solana. The firm Republic followed up by launching tokenized shares of SpaceX, also on the network. Meanwhile, Solana is also getting a serious speed upgrade. Over 52% of validators joined a two-week vote, and more than 98% gave the green light to move forward with the Alpenglow consensus protocol. The upgrade will slash finality time from more than 12 seconds to just 150 milliseconds. The Solana Foundation said the goal is to hit Web2-level speed with L1 security, making the network feel instant while still being trustless. In their August 21 blog post, they said this could unlock new use cases that need both speed and cryptographic certainty, calling it a step toward building financial rails that move as fast as the internet. The Solana network is still home to meme coins like Dogwifhat and Pudgy Penguins, along with other DeFi and gaming projects. But now the focus is changing. The meme phase is dying out, and Wall Street is trying to take over. Your crypto news deserves attention - KEY Difference Wire puts you on 250+ top sites
