Why Solana Memecoins Were "the Best Thing to Happen to Crypto"

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Why Solana Memecoins Were "the Best Thing to Happen to Crypto"

Cointelegraph 10.06.2026 145 просмотров 5 лайков

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Ben Nadareski, CEO of Solstice, joins us to discuss the future of DeFi, tokenized yield, institutional adoption, and why he believes Solana memecoins were one of the best things to happen to crypto. We explore how Solstice is bringing institutional-grade yield on-chain, why most tokenized yield products are not truly scalable, the growing convergence of TradFi and DeFi, and why institutions are already entering crypto at scale. Ben also shares insights from his time at Galaxy Digital, including the first crypto trade with Goldman Sachs, and explains why transparency, composability, and real-world utility will define the next phase of DeFi. 00:00 Intro 00:35 What Is Solstice and Why Does It Matter? 00:50 Why Most On-Chain Yield Isn't Scalable 01:15 Bringing Institutions Into DeFi 02:05 The First Crypto Trade With Goldman Sachs 02:30 Can TradFi and DeFi Coexist? 02:55 Why Solana Is Winning Builders and Capital 03:45 The Problem With Most Tokenized Yield Products 04:30 Why Memecoins Were Good for Crypto 05:00 How Retail and Institutions Can Play on the Same Field 05:40 The Biggest Risks Facing DeFi Today 06:50 Why DeFi Teams Need Wall Street Experience 07:45 The Future of DeFi and Institutional Adoption 08:15 Institutions Are Already Here #DeFi #Solana #Crypto #Yield #Tokenization #InstitutionalCrypto #TradFi #Web3 #Bitcoin #Solstice #DigitalAssets #CryptoInvesting #Blockchain #Finance #RWA Follow COINTELEGRAPH: Website: https://cointelegraph.com/ Telegram: https://t.me/cointelegraph Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cointelegraph Twitter: https://twitter.com/cointelegraph Mobile app: https://linktr.ee/cointelegraph_mobile Cointelegraph covers everything Bitcoin, bringing you the latest news, prices, breakthroughs, and analysis, with emphasis on expert opinion and commentary from the digital currency community.

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Intro

Most of the tokenized yield plays out there are not scalable and they're not what they say they are. They open you up to much more risk than is usually disclosed. I want institutional access to a DeFi protocol, a real use case, but preserve the DeFi principles that make it democratized, that make it self-custodial, that make it low fee. Solana is one of the most explosive places to build on right now. They have the most amount of developer activity, on-chain dapp revenue. Capital is flying to what works. Fast, better, cheap is a great narrative, but what's really sticking is the composability. Solstice tokenizes yield. We allow for

What Is Solstice and Why Does It Matter?

any user, institutional or retail, to access yield on chain seamlessly with no high watermarks to entry, no high management fees, and immediate access to institutional grade strategies.

Why Most On-Chain Yield Isn't Scalable

Most yield is not scalable, especially in the on-chain world. You have to look at what yield sources are truly scalable and institutional grade. When you look at Solstice, we have scalable yield strategies available to scale to billions with real-time proof of asset reserve showing exactly where your assets sit, and we've distributed tens of millions of dollars of yield to our users on both an institutional and retail basis to date.

Bringing Institutions Into DeFi

I've been in crypto since about 2013. I've worked at companies on Wall Street all the way through to R3, ConsenSys, SIX Digital Exchange, Galaxy Digital, and more, and we worked with a lot of institutional investors. It starts with the education phase, then it moves into the real-world application. You need to be speaking their language. So, Solstice has a team of institutional grade CVs across the table, and we've all been in the space on the TradFi side in one way or another. We know what they're looking for. The no-BS, cut straight to the line, how am I getting yield, where are the sources from, how do I invest, and how do I get access to these protocols. Solstice directly provides that to these institutional investors, and that's why we've had 40-plus of the largest names in crypto and in the TradFi world invest in our protocol now reaching over 500 million in TVL.

The First Crypto Trade With Goldman Sachs

One of the major things that I did was that Galaxy Digital we did the first crypto trade in history with a bank and that was with Goldman Sachs. We executed a non-deliverable option settled in Bitcoin. That market was not yet developed enough for large-scale liquidity and it wasn't DeFi composable. The whole reason a lot of us sat around the table and built this industry since 2013 is because of the fact that the DeFi composability are the principles in which we rely on and which we live on.

Can TradFi and DeFi Coexist?

We're building a new system. So with Solstice I was very well motivated to say, "I want institutional access to a DeFi protocol, a real use case, but preserve the DeFi principles that make it democratized, that make it self-custodial, that make it low fee, that make it want you to build something of the future. " That's exactly what Solstice is doing in the DeFi industry.

Why Solana Is Winning Builders and Capital

Solana is one of the most explosive places to build on right now. They have the most amount of developer activity, on-chain dapp revenue, the most amount of growth that we've seen by institutions over the last 2 years. When we started building on Solstice, the stablecoin market was only $2 billion. Now it's over $15 billion and there's a reason for that. Capital is flying to what works. Fast, better, cheap is a great narrative, but what's really sticking is the composability. You don't have fragmentation of liquidity, of use cases, of L2s. Everything's composable and it's not a zero-sum ecosystem. We launched with 50 plus partners across the Solana ecosystem on day one and that allows for our assets USX, EUSX, and now after our TGE last week of SLX, which has been now the number one trending token in the world for a week straight for a reason, all three are composable across 50 plus applications in the Solana ecosystem at scale.

The Problem With Most Tokenized Yield Products

DeFi is still a growing industry and in the current stage most of the tokenized yield plays out there are not scalable and they're not what they say they are. And what do I mean by that? Most of the yield that you see across many protocols are heavily incentivized by token incentives. They're not scalable strategies and they open you up to much more risk than is usually disclosed. That's why the transparency aspect of Solstice Protocol is one of our core pillars. When you look at how fast you can scale and how large you can scale, it's why we trade on the largest sex venues in the world for the delta neutral strategies that we offer. We're not tokenized incentives that's driving that yield and the numbers that we post are distribute. It's that simple. A second one is that the meme coin culture specifically on Solana

Why Memecoins Were Good for Crypto

was one of the best things that's ever happened. And why? Trump coin's a great example. I am not advocating for Trump coin in any capacity. However, it was $14 billion of flow overnight to a protocol that saw no breakage and saw an immediate response to allowing that capital flow instantly. Meme coins were one of the greatest things that allowed for institutional adoption to occur because it battle tested it with hundreds of millions of dollars of flow, if not billions to allow for the paving of the road for institutions to come.

How Retail and Institutions Can Play on the Same Field

Everyone in the world has access to Solstice regulation permitting in their jurisdictions, of course. Whether if you have a hundred million in your bank account or five pesos, it does not matter. You can access it at the same playing field. The direct OTC mint is for institutional investors to be regulatory compliant. Secondary pools on DEXes to swap into USX and USX or any of our upcoming strategies that we're announcing are all available to retail participants. This is not a high gate a high gated high water mark entry point at all for any investor. Retail and institution now finally play on the same playing field.

The Biggest Risks Facing DeFi Today

When FTX collapsed, a bad day for us in general, I would say, is that we are very ecosystem dependent on our partnerships and composability aspects. When things like for example, the Drift and Celcius Pack and a lot of these things that we saw in the industry over the last several months occurred, Solstice had zero exposure to all of it. Zero collateral assets, zero vault exposure, nothing. But that trust factor of the industry attacked everybody almost universally. From an institutional allocators point of view, when they're looking at the ecosystem and saying should I put my hundreds of millions of dollars of capital into this protocol, into this chain, whatever it might be, they look at the whole picture. So even if we aren't directly allocated and there's no direct exposure, we are inherently tied in this stage as one subsector of the industry. And so any of these major hacks and occurrences that we're seeing in the industry do affect all protocols equally. And it's something that all of us need to look out for each other for. That's why we've made sure that we implement time locks, multi-sigs, time verifications, and a globally distributed security base with multiple third-party audits. That type of standard is something we're offering to all of our partners as well of what we went through to ensure that institutions feel safe with their capital.

Why DeFi Teams Need Wall Street Experience

It absolutely helps and for one major reason. Even though it's an innovative tech industry, we have to remind ourselves it's DeFi, decentralized finance. We are financial managers. We are financial asset managers. Just because we can build amazing tech on web 3 does not mean that we know every single piece about Wall Street. And this is the exact crossover that needs to occur. I hired a team specifically across the Solstice ecosystem that had the background across TradFi and DeFi to make sure that everybody knew how important it was that in each due diligence conversation, at each transparency level, and at each application of our assets, the investors on both an institutional and retail perspective don't change the due diligence processes that they would normally go through in a financial advisor or asset manager. Everybody in the DeFi ecosystem needs to be aware of that. We are financial managers and tech innovators at the same time, not one of the other.

The Future of DeFi and Institutional Adoption

Positivity in the future is very bright for the DeFi ecosystem. DeFi summer was stamped as one sub small subsection of a season with it, but that's not the case. DeFi is about to grow and explode in more ways than anybody's ready for. As Bitcoin goes through its identity crisis right now, figuring out is it a digital gold store of value, is it an institutional grade asset, where does Bitcoin sit? In the background, DeFi has been quietly growing and integrating in more ways than anybody is even realizing. The wealth capital transfer is happening as we speak in

Institutions Are Already Here

real time, and the barriers between TradFi and DeFi are crumbling as we speak. This institutions are coming narrative is over. They're here, and they're coming at scale.

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