Building internet capital markets: RWAs, Stablecoins and BTC

A thought piece from our CEO @lynnwwins on the future of internet capital markets on Solana — exploring how BTC, RWAs, and stablecoins will power the next wave of on-chain growth.

I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about where Solana is headed and how we fit into that picture as a native DeFi application. My mental model boils down to a few key growth areas that I believe will drive the next wave of adoption—not just for Saros and Solana, but for crypto as a whole.

We’re deeply optimistic about Solana’s potential to be the place where all assets will be traded and leveraged in the future. For this reason, we’re committed solely to its ecosystem and pushing the growth of productive assets on the chain forward. In the last month alone, we’ve seen Saros emerge as the largest BTC DEX on Solana, enabling capital market participants to leverage BTC for trading, borrowing, and more.

Looking ahead, I see an even bigger opportunity for Solana to house canonical capital markets for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), which naturally include stablecoins as a core piece. I see a unique space emerging for a leading RWA Web 3 trading venue that enables majors, stablecoins, yield, and tokenized assets to all become productive on Solana. These aren’t just buzzwords—attracting majors and growing the stablecoin base are the building blocks for helping Solana become a genuine hub for internet capital markets.

Taking stock

Over the past month, Saros has onboarded about $70m USD of BTC onto Solana for the first time. Depending on which metric you look at, that accounts for about 5-7% of all BTC on the entire blockchain. The reason we want to see the most important assets become tradeable on Solana with sufficient liquidity, with BTC being a key component in bringing internet capital markets on-chain.

We’re not done with BTC yet and have some ideas for how the $1.3T+ of idle BTC capital can become more productive on Solana. But I wanted to put pen to paper on this thought piece to outline the exciting future I see for RWA and stablecoin capital markets - unified alongside BTC on Saros.

RWAs & Stablecoins: Missing pieces of the puzzle

It’s no secret that we think Solana is the best blockchain for trading markets. Over the past year, it has topped trading activity for all blockchains multiple times but the reality is, it’s currently lagging for RWAs.

In fact, Solana is just the fourth-largest chain for RWAs with a market share of under 4%. The term RWA covers a broad range of assets, but Web 3 has seen significant growth in ‘real-world’ financial assets, especially over the past year. In particular, tokenized stocks, gold, stablecoins backed by a range of RWAs, and even Pokémon cards all gain strong traction.

We have been asking the question internally at Saros - why is Solana not seeing as large a share of this activity as it warrants? Our answer is - it’s a question of focusing on key DeFi projects and certainly not down to technical limitations of the blockchain, which we believe to be the best home for them.

This is not to say Solana has been inactive in the RWA space - we have seen steps forward taken by the likes of Onre, Oro, Remora, xStocks, and Collector Crypt - all on Solana in the past 6 months.

We consider stablecoins to also be closely affiliated with RWAs - largely because most of them contain RWAs like dollars, bonds, or other assets. Just like other RWAs, we see a huge opportunity to grow their presence on Solana.

At the time of writing, Solana hosts only one-tenth the stablecoin supply of Ethereum. The scope for closing that gap couldn’t be clearer, especially when you consider Solana often tops Ethereum for both overall trading volume and number of traders.

This is a question of ecosystem development, strong BD, and building trust in the right places. We’re already seeing the tides start to turn in the wake of 18 months with no network downtime and established names like Sky’s USDS, PayPal’s pyUSD, and the Global Dollar, USDG, all expanding to Solana.

Creating a flywheel

When I think about the next phase of Solana’s growth, three pillars stand out: tokenized RWAs, stablecoins, and BTC.

RWA tokenization brings real-world yield and credibility, bridging traditional finance with DeFi. Stablecoins provide the liquidity rails and payment infrastructure for users and protocols alike. BTC and majors tap into an enormous reservoir of idle capital, ready to be mobilized on Solana. Importantly, it also brings assets that will expand its audience and user base.

As these assets converge, they spark a self-reinforcing flywheel: more assets → more liquidity → more traders → more builders → more use cases. This will take Solana up a level, positioning it as the go-to hub for internet capital markets. The place where global capital flows freely from RWAs to long-tail memecoins and many assets in between.

We’re excited about this future and committed to driving it forward.