On April 1, 2026, SBI Holdings’ market maker B2C2 was reported by several cryptocurrency media to have established Solana as the core network for routing and settling large stablecoin trades for its institutional clients. This market maker, headquartered in London and backed by Japan's largest online financial group, has long provided liquidity and cryptocurrency trading services to institutions such as Robinhood and Standard Chartered. Its technology stack adjustments often set a demonstration effect within the industry. With this decision surfacing, a more direct conflict began to take shape: traditional financial infrastructures represented by banking clearing systems and SWIFT are confronting high-performance public chains represented by Solana on the same “large settlement channel” track. At this point, B2C2 has pushed Solana to the center of the settlement path, leaving a suspense about how institutions will allocate stablecoin settlement shares between different public chains—who will next regard Solana as the “default option.”

Japanese Giant Endorsement: The Symbolic Significance of B2C2's Decision

Behind B2C2 stands the Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings. As one of Japan's largest online financial groups, SBI's influence in the fields of foreign exchange, securities, and digital assets makes its subsidiary B2C2 not only a top market maker in the cryptocurrency market but also an important hub connecting traditional financial institutions with the cryptocurrency market. This means that B2C2’s choice of underlying settlement networks is often seen as a barometer for mainstream financial institutions observing the maturity of cryptocurrency infrastructure.

In this adjustment, B2C2 has explicitly set Solana as the core network for routing and settling large stablecoin trades aimed at institutional clients. In other words, when it matches and hedges crypto exposures for banks, brokerages, or large platforms, the cross-platform fund allocation will prioritize the Solana route rather than simply distributing evenly across multiple chains. This sharply contrasts with the previous “multichain parallelism with on-demand routing” neutral stance, essentially giving Solana a higher priority label within the internal system.

More significantly, public information shows that B2C2's clients include traditional financial and internet brokerage benchmarks such as Robinhood and Standard Chartered. These firms operate in highly regulated and compliance-demanding environments, yet they are willing to connect to Solana-based on-chain settlement networks through B2C2, which the market interprets as an important sign of “compliant finance beginning to recognize high-performance public chains.” Compared with B2C2's previous “technical neutrality” on multichain support, this clear tilt towards Solana is both an engineering choice based on performance and cost considerations and an endorsement for the institutionalization prospects of a certain public chain through actual business weight.

From On-Chain Congestion to High-Frequency Routing: Institutional Demand for Efficiency

Traditionally, large stablecoin transfers aimed at institutions predominantly occur on mainstream networks like Ethereum. However, as on-chain activities periodically amplify, Ethereum's transaction fees soar and confirmation delays during peak periods have become frequent pain points for institutions: when the on-chain costs of a cross-platform fund allocation approach or exceed the arbitrage space, the economics of high-frequency hedging and cross-market arbitrage can deteriorate rapidly. In such cases, market makers and institutional trading departments show a rigid demand for high TPS and low, predictable costs.

In publicly available data dimensions, Solana has always been known for its high throughput, short confirmation times, and extremely low fees, capable of processing large-scale trades within a single block time, and keeping on-chain fees at an “insignificant” level for most time periods. Although specific values may vary under different statistical standards, its “high performance and high concurrency” technical label has become an industry consensus. Over the past two years, with the network completing a series of upgrades after multiple stress tests, Solana has gradually matured in client nodes, consensus stability, and monitoring and operating tools, getting closer to the stability, predictability, and convenience of compliance integration demanded by institutional-grade settlement.

For market makers like B2C2, settlement efficiency is not an abstract indicator but is directly tied to quote depth, hedging speed, and risk exposure management hard constraints. If cross-exchange hedging legs cannot be quickly completed due to delays in settlement, even a few minutes of price fluctuations can turn what was originally “risk-free arbitrage” into a “directional bet.” On a network like Solana with shorter confirmation times and extremely low fees, large amounts of funds can move frequently in a “batch refresh” manner, allowing market makers to place deeper liquidity on the order book, narrowing spreads. The closer the settlement timing is to the quote timing, the smaller the uncertainty in the market-making model becomes, giving institutions more incentive to migrate more settlement flow to such networks.

Another Vote After Circle: The Narratives of Solana Transitioning from DeFi to Settlement Backbone

Before B2C2's actions, mainstream fintech institutions like Circle had already given Solana several “votes” in payment and settlement scenarios. From issuing and supporting USDC to expanding payment and on-chain settlement applications, Circle has repeatedly listed Solana as one of the important underlying networks in its public statements and product layouts. Although the specific products and technical details vary widely, the overall narrative is very clear: Solana is no longer just a paradise for DeFi and speculative funds, but is now viewed as an infrastructure choice capable of bearing serious payment and settlement loads.

In this context, B2C2's upgrade of Solana to the core network for institutional large stablecoin settlement effectively fills a critical gap in the earlier “payment testing” phase with “market-making and large settlement.” A fintech firm focused on C-end and merchant settlements, and a liquidity provider dealing with B-end banks and brokerages, have respectively increased their investments in Solana, collectively forming a continuous link from “retail payments to institutional settlements.” This has shifted Solana's role from being once a “high-performance DeFi public chain” to gradually migrating toward a potential institutional settlement backbone.

Throughout this process, the market's old prejudices regarding “whether Solana is suitable for serious financial settlements” have also been compelled to correct. In the past, people focused more on its downtime incidents or the high volatility of the asset ecosystem, but now they are beginning to reexamine its network stability, operational resilience, and ability to connect with traditional financial systems. Of course, compared to networks like Ethereum and Tron that already have significant established volumes for stablecoin settlements, Solana is more engaged in implicit competition across a new dimension: who can capture the largest share of future incremental settlement demands in “high-frequency, high-concurrency scenarios.” As for how much funding will actually migrate to Solana, it remains difficult to make a quantitative judgment under the current lack of authoritative data.

New Passage for Traditional Banks and Internet Brokerages

In B2C2's client roster, the presence of Standard Chartered and Robinhood adds a dimension of real demand from traditional finance and internet brokerages to the originally crypto-native topic of “public chain settlement.” For a cross-border bank, the daily need to allocate large amounts of funds among multiple exchanges, OTC counterparts, and custody institutions around the clock; for an internet brokerage, providing retail clients with nearly 24-hour cryptocurrency trading services also means that the back-end fund flow continuously circulates between various trading venues and settlement nodes. The traditional settlement system's “downtime” during cross-time-zone, weekend, and holiday scenarios can no longer match the rhythm of such never-closing markets.

A typical institutional scenario is: the risk exposure of the same crypto asset is dispersed across multiple exchanges and liquidity pools, and market makers must continuously settle large stablecoins across platforms to maintain the overall position balance amid price fluctuations. If each hedging transaction must go through traditional bank transfers or slowly confirm on high-cost networks, then high-frequency trading strategies would be forced to “slow down” or even avoid certain market opportunities. By outsourcing on-chain settlements to specialized market makers and custodians like B2C2, traditional banks and internet brokerages can indirectly leverage the high performance of public chains like Solana without having to face the complexities of on-chain address management, gas optimization, and security audits themselves.

Under compliance frameworks, this “indirect on-chain” model is particularly crucial: banks and large brokerages still control client assets within legal and regulatory boundaries, but the underlying fund transfer tools start to partially switch from closed bank clearing systems to open public chains. For end-users, such infrastructure upgrades often manifest through enhanced withdrawal speeds, reduced on-chain transfer costs, and extended trading hours (approaching 24-hour uninterrupted); for product designers, it means being able to launch cross-platform one-click arbitrage, T+0 settlements, or even more complex derivatives combinations more boldly, no longer constrained by the time grids of traditional clearing batches.

The Game Between Chains: What Cake Is Solana Competing For

If we view stablecoin settlement as a multi-lane highway, different public chains have long formed their own divisions of labor: Ethereum provides security and ecological depth, carrying the most diverse DeFi and institutional-level contract logics; Tron holds a significant advantage in the global circulation and retail usage of USDT, deeply penetrating emerging markets due to low fees and ease of use; while Solana’s main selling point is its high-performance execution layer and relatively friendly development experience, making it inherently suitable for scenarios that require massive and high-frequency fund scheduling.

For market makers like B2C2, multichain routing has long been routine. When they allocate settlement flows between different public chains, core considerations include: whether the liquidity distribution on each chain is concentrated, how much security and operational risk cross-chain bridging brings, the cost of technical integration and subsequent operation maintenance, and whether the network can remain usable under extreme market conditions. Any instability in one link amplifies the systemic risks across the overall hedging and settlement system. Therefore, upgrading a public chain from “optional” to “core” signifies an upgrade of trust based on multi-dimensional consideration.

After B2C2 positioned Solana as the core network for institutional large stablecoin settlement, other public chains will inevitably need to think about how to offer more attractive combination schemes in terms of fee structure, native integration capability for stablecoins, and institutional-oriented node and custody services. What we are more likely to observe is a pattern of increased division of labor rather than a simple “winner-takes-all”: some networks continue to dominate high-value, low-frequency complex contract settlements, while others compete for dominance in high-frequency, low-latency institutional-level settlements. B2C2 betting on Solana is essentially providing its own route selection in this “high-frequency institutional settlement” niche.

From Testing Waters to Default Option: The Next Scene in Institutional Settlement Migration

In summary, B2C2's elevation of Solana to the core network for institutional large stablecoin settlement symbolizes a deep integration of traditional finance and high-performance public chains, moving from “technical testing” to “business default.” When a market maker backed by giants like SBI, serving clients including Standard Chartered and Robinhood, begins treating a certain public chain as a preferred channel in its internal system, the assessment framework of traditional finance for public chain infrastructure is simultaneously updating.

Key indicators worth mid-term observation include: whether more market makers will list Solana as a core settlement network in public documents or technical literatures; whether custodians and clearing service providers will launch Solana-specific settlement products for institutions; and whether banks and large brokerages will leave more direct access interfaces for high-performance public chains like Solana at the architecture level. These evolutions will determine Solana's weight in the narrative of “institutional settlement backbone,” rather than short-term price fluctuations.

At the same time, risks and uncertainties cannot be ignored. Regulatory attitudes may adjust at any time due to macro events and policy changes, redefining compliance boundaries for public chain settlements; if network-level technical stability events occur again, they could undermine institutional confidence in high-performance public chains; shifts in competitive strategies by other public chains regarding fee structures, enterprise-level support, and stablecoin ecosystems could also rewrite the current advantage landscape. In the absence of clear data and official statements, it is difficult to give a definitive judgment on SOL prices or specific fund flows, which belong more to the realm of market expectations interpretation.

What is certain is that the long-term competitive focus among public chains is gradually shifting from early contests around DeFi “mining yields” and short-term returns to a more infrastructure-oriented question: who can bear the main load of the future global institutional-level stablecoin clearing network. B2C2’s bet on Solana is merely one entry in this competition written into the timeline, but what it represents is traditional finance casting a more substantial vote for high-performance public chains with real business traffic.

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