Helius Joins the Solana Research Institute as Founding Member

We have joined the Solana Research Institute (SRI) as a Founding Member, and are proud to share the SRI's inaugural research piece: A Financial Institution's Guide to Solana.

As a Founding Member of the SRI alongside Solana Foundation, Jito, R3, and other ecosystem partners, we're committed to advancing rigorous, institutional research as public stewards of the Solana network.

What is the Solana Research Institute?

The Solana Research Institute is a Swiss-based, not-for-profit applied research forum dedicated to examining how financial institutions can participate in blockchain-based financial systems. 

Founded by Angus Scott—formerly Head of Innovation at Euroclear and Head of Product at CLS—and seeded by the Solana Foundation, the SRI provides systematic analysis of onchain infrastructure, evaluating the transition from legacy frameworks to high-performance capital markets.

The Institute brings together practitioners from traditional finance and the Solana ecosystem through research, structured discussions, and working groups. The SRI's focus covers the technical, legal, economic, and structural questions that will determine how the transition to blockchain-based rails for trading and payments will unfold.

Critically, the Solana Research Institute is not an advocacy organization. 

Its editorial stance places equal weight on performance data and institutional adoption as it does on stability concerns, concentration risks, regulatory gaps, and areas of improvement across the ecosystem. 

This rigor and integrity are the point.

Financial institutions will only trust analyses that treat the hard questions seriously. The SRI is built to meet this bar.

Why This Matters Now

The case for Solana at an institutional scale is no longer theoretical. 

USDC on Solana circulates 15.5x faster than on Ethereum. 

BlackRock, State Street, Franklin Templeton, Visa, and Fidelity all have live deployments on the network. 

The protocol has maintained 100% uptime since February 2024, and Alpenglow is set to bring finality down to 150ms—a latency profile that is becoming competitive with traditional market infrastructure.

The regulatory picture is also shifting:

• SOL, the native asset on the Solana blockchain, has been officially classified as a digital commodity by the SEC and the CFTC.
• The Genius Act has provided long-needed clarity for stablecoin issuance in the United States. 
• The Eurosystem's Appia Roadmap signals that public-chain participation is now on the agenda of central bank planners.

What has been missing is a structured resource that meets senior practitioners inside financial institutions on their own terms. 

The Solana Research Institute’s first publication, A Financial Institution's Guide to Solana, is neither a whitepaper nor a promotional piece.

It is a practical reference covering Solana's technology, economics, governance, regulatory context, and the institutional products already live on the network, written in clear, accessible language.

We believe it will become the standard onboarding reference for banks, asset managers, market infrastructure providers, and regulators engaging with Solana for the first time.

Why We Joined

Solana is the most battle-tested and scalable blockchain network in existence today that is capable of supporting the global demand for onchain trading, payments, and emerging digital asset use cases.

As one of Solana's leading infrastructure providers and publishers of technical content, we are uniquely positioned to help shape the institutional adoption of Solana.

Solana’s Leading Infrastructure Provider

We operate the RPC nodes, data streaming services, and transaction landing infrastructure that Solana's most influential teams, including Phantom, Jupiter, and Coinbase, depend on.

In addition to running one of the largest validators on Solana ourselves, we are trusted to run SOC 2 Type II compliant validators for institutions like Bitwise, which operates the largest Solana Staking ETF to date.

Because we're exclusively focused on serving Solana, we have a unique perspective and depth of knowledge on how to meet the security, compliance, and operational requirements of institutions.

This experience enables us to meaningfully contribute to institutional conversations regarding Solana's technology, economics, and more.

A Leading Voice in Solana Research and Developer Content

From day one, we believed that Solana’s growth depended on education.

We have spent years building one of the most comprehensive bodies of public writing on the network and, in doing so, have become one of the leading publishers of Solana research and developer content.

From institutional and protocol-level research reports to developer tutorials, interviews with core contributors, and cultural essays on the philosophical and sociocultural foundations underpinning blockchain technology, there are few topics we haven't covered.

Our work is read by builders, validators, institutional analysts, policy makers, and has even been cited by the White House. 

Joining a research body that aligns with our commitment to academic rigor and our desire to present the institutional case for Solana is a natural extension of the work we’ve been doing for years.

Our Commitment

Our commitment to Solana and its builders has never wavered.

As Solana enters a new era of mainstream growth, we're doubling down.

Solana's success as institutional financial infrastructure depends on the quality of the discourse around it, the depth of analysis available to decision-makers, and the willingness of the ecosystem's core participants to responsibly steward the protocol in public. 

The Solana Research Institute is where that hard work happens, and we look forward to being part of it.