Solana Research Institute Sizes Onchain Shift at $20.3 Billion

The Solana Research Institute has put a number on what a migration of financial market infrastructure to public blockchains could be worth: $20.3 billion in annual revenue that would either flow to new competitors or come back to users as lower costs. The figure comes from a scenario analysis published by SRI, a member-led institute focused on institutional participation in blockchain-based finance.

The math behind the headline number is straightforward. SRI estimates that the financial market infrastructure sector — the payment systems, clearinghouses and settlement systems that keep transactions moving — generates roughly $31.5 billion in annual revenue. Under the institute's scenario, incumbent providers would retain about $11.2 billion of that. The remaining $20.3 billion is the contested portion, and its destination depends heavily on one variable: regulatory protection for incumbents.

SRI is careful about what the number does and doesn't mean. Angus Scott, the report's author, wrote: "We are not making a forecast and certainly are not predicting a timeline." The report frames its figures as a scenario, not a call on whether finance actually moves to public blockchains, or when. That distinction matters for institutional readers deciding how much weight to give the analysis.

What functions are in scope?

SRI's analysis considers public blockchains taking over functions that financial market infrastructures, or FMIs, handle today. Three stand out in the report:

• Asset issuance — the creation and distribution of financial instruments on public chains
• Settlement — the final transfer of assets between counterparties
• Custody — the safekeeping of tokenized assets

The report also points to direct-access clearing and settlement assets for wholesale cross-border payments as another possible use case, a segment where correspondent-chain friction has long made costs stubbornly high.

What could keep incumbents in the game?

SRI doesn't present the shift as inevitable. The report identifies several factors that could continue to support incumbent providers, or alternatively strengthen new onchain services:

• Legal frameworks — clarity on which rules apply to which rails
• Risk management — the operational and credit safeguards FMIs have built over decades
• Network effects — the gravitational pull of established liquidity and participant bases

These are the levers regulators and market participants will effectively contest, and the $20.3 billion at stake is the prize.

Who is behind the analysis?

SRI describes itself as a member-led institute focused on institutional participation in blockchain-based finance. Its members are drawn from the Solana ecosystem and help shape the research agenda — a structural alignment worth noting when the analysis centers on public blockchains, and Solana's in particular, absorbing FMI functions.

The institutional framing is deliberate. SRI is speaking to banks, market operators and infrastructure providers weighing whether to build on public chains, not to retail traders. The core question the report poses to that audience is operational: if issuance, settlement and custody can run on shared rails at lower cost, what justifies the current fee stack?

For incumbents, the scenario sketches a squeeze — $20.3 billion of revenue either competed away or passed back to users as savings. For challengers, it sizes the addressable pool. For regulators, it maps where protection could distort, or preserve, market structure.

The report's own caveat stands as the operative constraint: no forecast, no timeline. But with tokenization pilots and settlement experiments already live at major market operators, the direction of travel is being tested in production, one use case at a time.