Helius BlogApr 30, 05:50 PM
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 belie