According to Forbes, the U.S. financial system completed its shift to T+1 settlement for equities in May 2024, a major structural change. In response, a new blockchain called Solayer launched its permissioned mainnet alpha at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, built for real-time settlement and claiming over 300,000 sustained TPS with sub-second finality. Its first live app, Spout, tokenizes U.S. equities and ETFs into stablecoins for instant conversion. The chain uses a custom, hardware-accelerated Solana VM (InfiniSVM) and lets developers deploy Solana apps with no code changes. Competitors like Backed Finance, now owned by Kraken, already offer over 60 tokenized equities with T+0 settlement on Solana, processing $12 billion in volume, while giants like BlackRock are piloting tokenized settlement with JPMorgan.
The Speed Promise vs. The Trust Deficit
Here’s the thing: the technical promise is insanely compelling. Why *should* a trade take a day to settle when the tech exists to do it in milliseconds? Solayer’s pitch is basically that developers can finally build reactive, real-time apps without the blockchain itself being the bottleneck. That’s a big deal.
But infrastructure speed is only one piece of the puzzle. Actually, it might be the easiest piece. The hard part is everything else: regulation, custody, and decentralization. Solayer’s Spout app talks about 1:1 backing with U.S. custodians and KYC gates, but Forbes notes its regulatory and custody disclosures are “still in progress.” That’s a massive, flashing yellow light. You can’t just waltz into tokenizing regulated securities without having every single compliance ‘i’ dotted and ‘t’ crossed. The SEC and other watchdogs will have a field day if you try.
Centralization Is The Achilles Heel
And then there’s the architecture. To get that insane speed, Solayer uses a centralized sequencer. That’s a single point of control that orders transactions. It introduces censorship risk—someone could, in theory, block your trade. The project says it has a Solana fallback and plans to decentralize, but timelines and hardware audits are unclear. For a system aiming to handle real financial assets, that’s a huge gamble. Institutions won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole until that’s resolved.
Look at who’s already operating in this space. Backed Finance has real volume and assets under management. Ondo Finance has already navigated SEC scrutiny. These players are moving within existing frameworks, sometimes even accepting T+2 behind the scenes to stay compliant. They’re building the plane while flying it, but with a parachute. Solayer seems to be building a rocket sled first and figuring out the safety harness later.
The Real Race Isn’t About TPS
So the race isn’t really about who has the highest transactions per second. It’s about who can build a system that’s fast *and* trustworthy enough for regulated finance. That requires deep regulatory partnerships, ironclad legal structures, and proven security over time. BlackRock isn’t messing around with some permissioned mainnet alpha; it’s piloting with JPMorgan’s platform. That tells you where the institutional confidence is right now.
I think the vision is right. Real-time settlement *should* be the future. It reduces risk and frees up capital. But the path to get there for crypto-native projects is littered with regulatory landmines and institutional skepticism. Solayer’s tech is fascinating, but its success hinges on the boring stuff: lawyers, compliance officers, and auditors. In the world of high-stakes finance, the slowest part of the system is never the hardware—it’s the human trust layer. And that still takes time to build.
