September 2024: Token2049 and Solana Breakpoint Highlight The Next Wave: Institutional Investments, Stablecoins, and Asia’s Influence

• Asia remains way ahead of the West in embracing crypto. This is often discussed in the consumer context but is also true for the government’s support and regulatory frameworks.

• Temasek, a Singaporean state-owned multinational investment firm with $288B AUM, actively incubates and spins out companies leveraging blockchains.

• Hong Kong has recently published stablecoin regulation proposal, and a handful of companies are actively working with the HK government to launch HKD stablecoins.

• Japan has not only a robust and proscriptive framework for the treatment of digital assets, but also many initiatives and commercial applications from banking (SBI, Nomura, Daiwa) to real estate.

• The reopening of China to crypto continues to be an important theme with OKX and HTX front and center.

• It is noteworthy that Binance was not visible in Singapore this year.

• The crypto community and VCs are particularly excited about such narratives as TEE's (trusted execution environment), DePIN, Telegram Open Network (TON), and some crypto x AI projects.

• Significant developments in crypto are happening in Asia, backed by some deep-pocket local VCs/funds. There was a renewed focus on apps owning end-user relationships.

• Renaissance in lending and DeFi were strong underlying themes.

• Recognition of tokenized treasuries, stablecoins, and institutional grade products, evidenced by extensive participation and sponsorship by large financial institutions such as Fidelity, PayPal, City, Franklin Templeton, and others.

• A few newer L1s and L2s demonstrated that there is still an opportunity and strategic whitespace to build alternative rails.

• Corporate giants like Sony rolled out new initiatives focused on eventually uniting creators and IP on their chains.

• We noticed that on-chain revenue models were discussed more widely than ever before. There were more questions about monetization, actual revenue, and business models when talking about crypto projects than before.

• Asian allocators are generally open to crypto and see why this technology will be valuable. Most institutional investors in Asia are increasingly allocating to digital assets in their portfolios.

• More than ever before, VCs remained value-disciplined with an increasing focus on fundamental KPIs when evaluating startups.

• Pre-seed and seed ecosystems seem robust and have not experienced a slowdown in funding, especially for projects offering token warrants and other liquid sweeteners.

• Many Series A+ startup teams strategically wait to raise capital until Q4 or later.

• Growth-stage companies were present but not actively fundraising or communicating the need for capital.

• Besides speed and scalability, Solana’s token extensions were key factors that drove the expansion of PYUSD, PayPal’s flagship stablecoin, to the Solana blockchain. Solana’s token extensions are advanced features that enable developers to create tokens with unique features tailored to specific use cases: transaction confidentiality, managing charges for transactions, transfer restrictions and multi-signature approvals, and enhanced customization options.

• Visa has already settled millions of dollars of USDC over the Ethereum and Solana blockchains between its clients. They are committed to continuing to innovate around settlement options. The head of Visa Crypto said that 65% of stablecoin transactions on Solana are under $100, and Ethereum is less cost-effective to be able to do lower-value transactions frequently.

Institutions are increasingly adopting Solana for new financial products:

• Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest financial players boasting over $1.3T in AUM announced its intention to launch a mutual fund on the Solana blockchain.

• Citibank, the fourth largest bank in the United States, shared that it was exploring Solana’s potential, suggesting that seamless money transfers and advanced smart contract composability present unique opportunities in the future. Citi has implemented blockchain-based solutions for financial applications. For example, they recently launched the Citi Integrated Digital Assets Platform (CIDAP), a technology stack for internal money transfers.

• Securitize is the leading tokenization platform, helping bring over $950 million in value on chain. Securitize is the tokenization partner for BlackRock’s BUIDL, the largest chain fund, and also has tokenized feeder funds for KKR and Hamilton Lane. Securitize will add native support for Solana, allowing it to deploy its tokenized assets on the network.

• Societe Generale’s digital assets subsidiary, SG FORGE, is adding support for Solana, starting with its EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) stablecoin launch. EURCV is the first MiCA-compliant stablecoin issued by a bank. In the future, SG FORGE may also bring its other tokenized security products to Solana, including Smart Cash, Structured Products, and Bonds.

Top infrastructure projects on Solana attracted a lot of attention:

• Hivemapper is shipping the ‘Bee’ dashcam to build a global mapping network.

• Geodnet is launching a Solana-based version of its earth observation network.

• Helium, the original DePIN pioneer, is now running on Solana and works seamlessly with the new Solana phone.

• Render, the decentralized GPU rendering platform, has just integrated with Dropbox and AWS.

• Solana's focus on mobile & direct to consumer strongly differentiates them from other L1s. Twitter crypto community compared Breakpoint to Apple's product announcement events.

• Solana Mobile has unveiled details about its second Solana phone, the Seeker. Planned for a 2025 release, the phone boasts a native wallet built with SolFlare that integrates with Solana Mobile's secure seed vault and will be secured by a thumbprint. The Seeker had already been pre-ordered over 140k times by the time the phone came out of stealth. At a $450 price, Solana Mobile can contribute over $63M in revenue.

New exciting company announcements:

• Sling Money, a simplified payments app; Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company; and Huma Finance, a payment finance company.

• Jump Crypto's Firedancer Solana validator client launches on the Solana mainnet. Firedancer will aim to address Solana's scaling challenges, pushing Solana's performance to new heights.

• Both Jupiter and Drift announced effective expansion of their ecosystem.

• The role of Memecois was actively acknowledged with a big event put on by the BONK team, and the expansion of a meme into an ecosystem similar to what we saw with the Yuga/Ape playbook.