The Solana Ecosystem Comes Together
During TOKEN2049 week, when the crypto world converged in Singapore to debate the future of digital assets, Auros, in collaboration with the Solana Foundation, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), DoubleZero, Bonk and Arkham Intelligence, brought the Solana ecosystem together for an evening that was equal parts celebration and reflection.
Solana & Sake Night gathered a rare cross-section of the network’s most active participants, with more than 500 builders, traders, venture capitalists, and ecosystem partners under one roof.
What began as a festive gathering quickly evolved into a live experiment in convergence – where liquidity meets code and where capital becomes programmable. The night made one thing clear: the next chapter of Solana’s story will not just be written in headlines but in the invisible architecture of markets that seamlessly run themselves. So what does it take to turn liquidity into infrastructure and volatility into design?
The builders and market makers have something to say.
The Professionalisation of On-Chain Liquidity
Standing out from other networks, Solana offers an execution environment that rivals traditional financial venues in both speed and depth. The numbers show block times averaging just between 400 and 600 milliseconds, prop AMMs achieving as low as 0-0.5bps on major pairs like SOL/USDC and routing engines like Jupiter that direct more than half of Solana’s DEX activity at the best price with minimal slippage.
Such performance signals a striking change: liquidity depth is no longer a passing symptom of bull markets or mining schemes. It’s embedded into the infrastructure itself. By ensuring that execution quality can scale with demand, the network can now reinforce a self-sustaining loop: faster settlement leads to lower slippage, which then attracts greater organic order flow on-chain and incentivises further infrastructure investment. The positive effects of this loop are already visible in market activity, with over 2 million daily active addresses, around 62 million daily transactions, and over US$30 billion in weekly DEX turnover.
For market makers, what this means is that their role now extends beyond providing liquidity to shaping the very market conditions under which value moves. With Solana becoming a serious financial infrastructure layer, market makers are enabled to maintain efficient price discovery and manage risk in near real time through network upgrades such as QUIC transport, stake-weighted Quality-of-Service (QoS), and localised fee markets. The result is the professionalisation of liquidity on Solana — one that is deep, efficient, and resilient across volatile market cycles.
“Solana has proven that institutional-grade liquidity can be engineered at the protocol level. For Auros, that creates the opportunity to design fresh strategies on rails that are as reliable as traditional finance, yet deliver the efficiency that decentralised networks are known for.” Jason Atkins, Chief Commercial Officer, Auros, shared.
Institutions Are Not Dipping In — They’re Building On
Beyond passive exposure, the institutional conversation around Solana has moved to active strategy. In earlier years, many institutions treated Solana as a speculative allocation or ran small-scale pilot programs.
Today, we see participation shift to strategic construction. Aside from the multiplication of investment products linked to Solana (ie. Franklin Templeton’s BENJI and Graycale’s Solana Trust), traditional financial institutions are beginning to build for native deployment, protocol-level participation, and infrastructure bets that embed their capital and code into Solana’s programmable fabric.
At its core, this shift points to something deeper: DeFi is no longer a niche alternative to traditional finance, but a design frontier. The convergence of institutional capital with open-source, programmable infrastructure means an evolution of legacy systems, not dilution. As institutions transition from token holders to active on-chain strategists, decentralisation is set to be the natural evolution of finance.
“Digital assets are now a real part of how institutions operate. More firms are building systems that live on-chain, using open networks to move capital with speed and clarity. The growth happening around Solana shows how transparent markets and strong infrastructure can create lasting change in global finance,” said Justin Kugel, Head of Business Development at World Liberty Financial
Resilience is the New Alpha
The new Solana story is one of resilience, discipline, and alignment. After weathering cycles and building through setbacks, Solana has emerged not just as a high-speed blockchain, but as a network that has institutionalised liquidity and execution quality as part of its design. Its story is no longer about recovery, but about setting new standards for how on-chain markets should function.
As Solana continues to mature, Auros and the Solana Foundation share a common mission: to deepen liquidity, enhance transparency, and refine on-chain market design. As institutional involvement kicks into high gear, the next phase of Web3 innovation demands resilience — one that isn’t about just weathering volatility but designing for it.