The Sol Street Journal - Issue #2
October 29, 2025
Welcome back to The Sol Street Journal. Pour yourself something (whatever you want, we won’t judge you) - because we’ve got a lot to unpack.
Before we dive in - tomorrow, we’re going live for the first Soltober Roundup: scrolling the timeline so you don’t have to with some real-time hot takes. Where? On X, obviously.
🗓️ Oct 30, 2 pm CET - live at @Neon_EVM. Set a reminder now so you don’t forget!
Now, back to business. The second half of October sat right at the intersection of Wall Street and Internet Capital Markets - ETF approvals, Wall Street pop-ups, and a lot of good stuff in between.
Let’s break it down.
🩷 Welcome, TradFi
Hong Kong’s world first Solana spot ETF by ChinaAMC is officially live
Internet Capital Markets have entered Wall Street: $BSOL, the first SEC-approved Solana staking ETF by Bitwise, is now trading on the NYSE
Grayscale Solana Trust ETF $GSOL is also live and will start trading on the NYSE tomorrow
Western Union, the world’s largest money transfer business, joins the crypto arms race and chooses to build exclusively on Solana. Its new stablecoin, launching in 2026, will integrate directly into its 150-country network
👑 Milestones
The total value of tokenized RWAs on Solana hits a new ATH, crossing $700M
Over the past week, more than $155 million worth of assets have been bridged from other chains to Solana
Paypal’s stablecoin $PYUSD on Solana surpasses $1B
📊 DEXs & Prediction Markets
Uniswap now supports Solana
Jupiter introduces Ultra v3, its new end-to-end trading engine built for peak execution, plus a prediction market for the Formula1 Mexico Grand Prix, powered by Kalshi
Everyone’s betting on betting - and Solana is delivering with a new wave of launches: worm.wtf’s permissionless prediction markets, PredX.ai’s battle-royale prediction market, Reals’ DAO governance through prediction markets.
💧 DeFi, Payments & RWAs
Unified liquidity protocol USDT0 unlocks native $USDT deployments on Solana, linking users to nearly $170B in liquidity across chains. XAUt0, the omnichain version of Tether Gold (XAUt) is also live, accelerating Solana’s positioning as the home for RWAs.
Gemini expands $USDC and $USDT support to Solana and launches a new credit card with 4% SOL buyback and auto-staking built in.
Superstate partners with Backpack, making it the first CEX to list SEC-registered equities. Real stocks are coming on-chain.
Encrypted electronic cash Zcash launches on
SolanaZolana
🔧 Infra
Helius drops a major RPC upgrade - a new distributed archival storage system that makes Solana’s historical data 1,000x faster to query. Mert: “today, Solana changes forever”
Anza introduces proposal SIMD-0266 “Efficient Token Program” to launch pToken - an upgrade to SPL Token that cuts usage by up to 98% and frees 12% of block space for other txns. TL;DR: same tokens, more speed.
💃 Apps Just Wanna Have Fun(ds)
a16z Crypto makes a $50M strategic investment in Solana staking protocol Jito
MonkeDAO opens applications for MonkeFoundry, their incubator for early-stage teams building on Solana. Applications open until Nov 12.
🧠 For the Overthinkers
Here’s a curated list of long-form reads, interviews, and research worth your bandwidth:
Report - Grayscale: Solana: Crypto’s Financial Bazaar
Podcast - MoneyMasters: Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation, explains how the chain is powering a new generation of financial infra. Solana: The Fastest Blockchain You’ve Never Fully Understood
Podcast - Milk Road: Bitwise Explains Why Solana’s Setup Is the Best in 8 Years w/ Matt Hougan & Ryan Rasmussen
Report - a16z: State of Crypto 2025: The year crypto went mainstream
Podcast - Lightspeed: Everything You Need To Know About Meteora’s Token Launch
That’s it for today. For the full October overview, read Issue #1.
Thanks for reading through, see you again on Wednesday, November 12 - same street, new stories.
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