When Bitwise Asset Management CIO Matt Hougan speaks about digital asset strategy, institutional investors tend to listen. This week, Hougan once again turned the spotlight on Solana (SOL), a network he says offers investors “two ways to win.”
In a detailed post on X, Hougan argued that Solana’s growing traction in both stablecoin settlements and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization gives it a powerful dual thesis that most other blockchains cannot match. His reasoning reflects a broader shift in institutional crypto sentiment: the pivot from speculative narratives toward networks with measurable utility and transaction demand.
“I love investments that give me two ways to win,” Hougan wrote. “Solana is making a bet that the stablecoin and tokenization infrastructure market will grow and that it will win an increasing share of that market. Those both seem like good bets to me.”
Solana’s Dual Market Bet
According to Hougan, Solana’s bullish case rests on two reinforcing trends:
The explosive global demand for stablecoin infrastructure as the next frontier of fintech payments, and
The rapid evolution of tokenized financial assets, bonds, treasuries, and funds being issued on-chain.
“People dramatically underestimate how much and how quickly these technologies will remake markets,” Hougan said, adding that both stablecoin and tokenization volumes could grow “by 10x or more” within the decade.
This thesis echoes the narrative voiced by traditional finance (TradFi) giants like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan, all of which are experimenting with tokenized assets. If Solana can capture even a modest fraction of those flows, it could become a key backbone for on-chain financial infrastructure.
Why Solana Stands Out
While Ethereum remains the dominant player in decentralized finance (DeFi), Hougan believes Solana’s technical efficiency, low fees, and developer momentum give it unique leverage for certain use cases.
“Solana offers fast, user-friendly technology, backed by a great community with a ship-fast attitude,” Hougan noted.
Indeed, Solana’s transaction throughput and cost structure make it attractive for stablecoin settlement and micropayments in areas where latency and transaction cost directly impact user experience. For global remittances, merchant settlements, and DeFi operations, that efficiency could translate into significant adoption advantages.
According to data from DefiLlama, Solana currently hosts over $14.9 billion in stablecoin market capitalization and more than $11.3 billion in total value locked (TVL), impressive though still dwarfed by Ethereum’s $163 billion in stablecoins and $85 billion TVL.
But that disparity doesn’t discourage Hougan. Instead, he sees it as a sign of early-stage opportunity. Solana, alongside Tron and BNB Smart Chain, is emerging as one of Ethereum’s most credible challengers, especially in markets that prioritize speed and scalability over composability.
Institutional Interest Begins to Build
Hougan’s remarks come amid rising institutional curiosity about Solana’s ecosystem. Earlier this week, Western Union announced it would leverage Solana for stablecoin settlements, one of the first major financial services brands to publicly integrate the network into its operations.
“It’s a newer asset and is playing catch-up against its peers in winning institutional mandates, but it’s gaining ground,” Hougan said.
Institutional inflows have also started reflecting that trend. Bitwise’s own Solana-linked investment products, including its recently launched staking ETF, allow investors to gain exposure to Solana’s yield and ecosystem without the complexities of direct participation.
Meanwhile, on-chain activity is steadily increasing. Daily active users, developer counts, and protocol launches have all grown since late 2024, reinforcing the idea that Solana’s post-“network outage” phase has evolved into a more mature, enterprise-friendly infrastructure layer.
The Broader Stablecoin Race
The real-world implications of Solana’s strategy become clearer when viewed within the global stablecoin expansion.
Stablecoins, dollar-pegged tokens like USDT and USDC now settle more value annually than Visa and Mastercard combined. They are becoming foundational to remittances, DeFi, and even centralized payment rails. Yet, their concentration remains highly uneven: Ethereum and Tron currently dominate issuance and transaction volumes.
For Solana, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity. With projects like Circle’s USDC expanding native support and integrations by payment companies and on/off-ramp providers, Solana could soon emerge as a third major stablecoin rail.
The speed advantage is especially relevant. Solana routinely processes over 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) at negligible fees, metrics that dwarf even Ethereum’s rollup-based scaling solutions. For stablecoin transfers and tokenized assets that require high-frequency clearing, those performance benchmarks could be decisive.
Hougan believes that if Solana continues to capture even single-digit market share in global stablecoin settlements, its token economics could benefit immensely, especially given the anticipated growth of stablecoin supply to over $1 trillion by 2030, as forecasted by multiple research firms.
Solana’s Institutional Makeover
Once dismissed as a “retail chain,” Solana’s ecosystem has steadily matured.
After suffering multiple high-profile outages in 2022 and 2023, the network underwent major architectural upgrades to improve stability and validator synchronization. Those efforts paid off; 2025 has seen near-perfect uptime metrics, restoring confidence among developers and investors alike.
This stability has enabled a new wave of institutional experiments, from on-chain treasuries and RWA tokenization pilots to payment corridor integrations in emerging markets.
Solana’s partnerships now include fintech and enterprise players ranging from Visa and Shopify integrations to USDC remittance rails across Latin America and Asia.
That broader institutional rebranding mirrors a trend across the crypto industry: the alignment between blockchain scalability and enterprise-grade utility. Solana’s bet is that real-world usage, not just speculative yield, will drive the next phase of blockchain adoption.
Bitcoin and the ‘Two Ways to Win’ Framework
Interestingly, Hougan applied the same logic to Bitcoin (BTC) in his analysis. He argued that Bitcoin, too, provides investors with “two ways to win,” both through the expansion of the global store-of-value market and through Bitcoin’s increasing share of that market.
“A mistake many investors make is focusing too much on Bitcoin winning market share and too little on the growth of the market itself,” Hougan explained.
Citing historical data, he noted that the global store-of-value market, including gold, sovereign wealth funds, and other long-term assets, grew from under $3 trillion in 2005 to over $27.5 trillion today. If similar dynamics continue, Bitcoin could benefit substantially even if its relative share remains small.
The same principle, he argues, applies to Solana: even modest share gains in a rapidly expanding market could lead to outsized returns.
Ethereum Still Dominates, but Competition Heats Up
While Hougan remains “very bullish” on Ethereum, he acknowledges that alternative layer-1 networks like Solana, Tron, and BNB Chain are carving out their own defensible niches.
Ethereum’s robust developer community and dominant DeFi infrastructure make it a long-term cornerstone of the crypto economy. Yet, its reliance on rollups and slower transaction finality may limit its competitiveness in real-time financial applications such as remittances, merchant payments, and microfinance.
Solana, by contrast, aims to be the “Visa of crypto,” offering instant settlement and minimal friction at scale.
“If I’m right,” Hougan said, “the combination of a growing market and a growing market share will be explosive for Solana. Just as with Bitcoin.”
Wall Street’s Growing Curiosity
Bitwise’s internal positioning toward Solana also aligns with a rising tide of Wall Street interest in alternative blockchains. Asset managers like Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and 21Shares have all referenced Solana in their digital asset research notes, citing its performance and liquidity as potential reasons for future fund inclusion.
In parallel, staking-based ETFs and structured products are proliferating, signaling a new institutional phase where blockchain diversity becomes a portfolio advantage rather than a risk factor.
Hougan’s repeated endorsement of Solana, therefore, reflects more than just personal conviction. It’s a strategic positioning for Bitwise as institutional clients look beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum to a broader spectrum of on-chain yield and infrastructure opportunities.
The Long Game: Tokenization and Real-World Assets
If Solana’s early advantage in stablecoins serves as its near-term growth engine, tokenization could be its long-term moat.
Major financial institutions are experimenting with tokenized U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, and money market funds, collectively forming a $50 billion segment that could grow into the trillions as blockchain infrastructure matures.
Solana’s technical capacity for high-frequency settlement makes it an ideal host for such instruments, particularly when paired with stablecoins as settlement assets. In that sense, the network could underpin the next-generation capital markets stack, where every asset from equities to real estate exists in tokenized form.
Hougan’s confidence, therefore, isn’t just about short-term price performance; it’s about structural positioning in what he and many others view as the next great frontier of finance.
Outlook: Two Markets, One Ascent
Matt Hougan’s bullish thesis encapsulates a simple but powerful idea: in an era where blockchain utility is finally meeting institutional capital, projects that serve real-world economic functions—payments, settlements, and tokenization—stand to benefit most.
Solana, by his measure, sits squarely at that intersection.
If the stablecoin economy expands tenfold and tokenization reshapes traditional markets, Solana could emerge not just as a competitor to Ethereum but as a complementary, high-speed infrastructure layer underpinning the global digital economy.
As Hougan summed it up:
“If both markets grow and Solana gains even a modest share that’s two ways to win. It’s easy for me to imagine this market growing by 10x or more.”