Emily Walker
Multicoin Capital, a venture firm dedicated to cryptocurrency, has put forth an ambitious investment argument claiming that Solana, valued at $100 billion, may eventually surpass major traditional finance entities like NYSE, NASDAQ, and CME. The detailed 17-minute read, authored by Co-Founder Kyle Samani and named “The Solana Thesis: Internet Capital Markets,” elaborates on how SOL could seize value from the global financial infrastructure.
Potential for Solana to Surpass Traditional Exchanges
Multicoin Capital has supported Solana since its initial funding round in May 2018. They highlight that the blockchain is now “the fastest-growing developer ecosystem,” boasting surpassing achievements compared to Ethereum across various metrics, including trading volumes and active users. Samani notes that the insight is Multicoin’s fifth substantial discussion focused on SOL.
“With Solana now a $100 billion asset, we felt compelled to share our insights on how we perceive SOL as a strong investment opportunity,” writes Samani.
The central thesis posits that Solana’s architecture can significantly reduce user fees by 90% to 99%, positioning it to achieve a market cap eclipsing many existing financial institutions. Unlike traditional exchanges that profit only from trading fees, Solana’s decentralized setup allows it to generate additional revenue from various financial protocols built on its platform.
Samani emphasizes that the real value goes beyond sheer transaction revenues. Despite low transaction fees (around $0.001), which are beneficial for users, these costs are trivial compared to standard fees in traditional payment systems.
However, he views payment adoption as crucial: “Payments play a vital role in fostering user adoption… they tend to spread virally,” Samani explains.
The report outlines how the viral nature of transactions enhances wallet usage, driving new users to the ecosystem. This process increases liquidity and volume for DeFi applications that generate the majority of profits.
He also points out the importance of conditional liquidity (CL), introduced by the DeFi platform DFlow on Solana. CL enables market makers to provide narrower price gaps by ensuring that only trustworthy transaction flows interact with this liquidity.
“CL is an emerging idea… we believe it will soon dominate on-chain liquidity provisioning,” Samani notes, likening it to trading practices seen in traditional finance, such as those utilized by Robinhood. This shift could lead to better pricing for everyday users, effectively reducing the efficiency disparity between centralized and decentralized exchanges.
Samani anticipates that Solana’s forthcoming Multiple Concurrent Leaders (MCL) system—allowing multiple nodes to produce blocks concurrently—will facilitate quicker access to market-moving data. Unlike conventional exchanges limited by a single physical server, MCL enhances speed by distributing leadership throughout the network, improving decentralized price discovery.
He envisions Solana evolving into more than just a “decentralized NASDAQ,” but as a comprehensive platform for all financial services, covering areas like lending, derivatives, and the tokenization of real estate and equities.
“In the future, almost all assets are likely to trade on decentralized, permissionless systems like Solana,” Samani asserts. He also points out the opportunity for new asset types, such as fractionalized real estate or tokenized collectibles, positioning Solana to manage and trade various forms of tokenized assets.
A significant aspect discussed is how blockchains like Solana can capitalize on maximum extractable value (MEV)—the potential income that validators or miners can harvest by ordering transactions. Samani claims that with a growing number of financial protocols on-chain, MEV could emerge as the main revenue generator.
“Solana itself doesn’t offer financial services directly. Instead, it creates the foundational framework that supports countless financial services. While transaction costs are minimal… Solana benefits from the expansion of these services through MEV,” he argues.
According to the thesis, Solana generated over $800 million in “REV” (revenue minus token inflation) in the last quarter of 2024, a substantial increase from nearly nothing a year prior, equating to an annualized value of $3.2 billion—remarkable given the limited presence of traditional assets on-chain and the developmental stages of many DeFi protocols on Solana.
In wrapping up the thesis, Samani concludes that Solana’s decentralized model could eventually overshadow traditional exchanges by offering:
- Reduced fees and increased liquidity,
- Accelerated transaction finality globally,
- Support for diverse tokenized assets,
- Creation of fully composable financial products,
- An open platform for unrestricted development.
“There is a tremendous opportunity to craft a global, permissionless financial ecosystem… This represents our vision for Internet Capital Markets and for Solana,” writes Samani.
Multicoin is betting that Solana’s ongoing growth will spur a wave of innovation that legacy infrastructures—like NYSE, NASDAQ, CME, and others—will struggle to match due to their closed systems. The realization of this ambitious vision will hinge on regulatory acceptance, technological advancements, and the willingness of traditional finance to adopt on-chain innovations.
Current trading price for SOL is $249.50.