As SOL ETFs Surge, Alchemy Revamps Solana’s Infrastructure for Institutional Growth

Recent investments exceeding $280 million into U.S. Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have raised expectations for a total of $5 billion in inflows over the upcoming year. In light of this growth, Alchemy has undertaken a significant redesign of Solana's infrastructure to accommodate increased demand and ensure high performance across all platforms.

Key Takeaways

Over $280 million has been invested in Solana ETFs within the first six trading days.
Alchemy has redesigned Solana’s infrastructure to enhance reliability and performance.
The updated architecture offers significantly improved speed and downtime metrics.
Upcoming ETF adoption and projects like Western Union’s stablecoin aim to further institutionalize Solana.

SOL PRICE

A Major Investment in Solana ETFs

Investors have rapidly injected more than $280 million into new U.S. Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs) within just six trading days. Analysts now anticipate inflows could reach as high as $5 billion throughout the next year. As Solana becomes increasingly integral to institutional investment portfolios, questions arise regarding whether its existing infrastructure can support the high-frequency activities associated with ETFs, wallets, and consumer applications.

In response to this growing demand, Web3 infrastructure company Alchemy has completely redesigned its Solana stack. This overhaul is focused on minimizing downtime, improving response times, and increasing throughput, ensuring that both institutional and retail users experience smooth network interactions even during high-demand periods.

Overcoming Challenges in a Growing Environment

This week, Solana has successfully navigated broader market concerns linked to Federal Reserve policies, with officials stressing that anticipated rate cuts in December are "not a foregone conclusion." The introduction of BSOL has unlocked $417 million in new capital for Solana’s ecosystem, providing a new route for U.S. investors to access regulated SOL staking yields.

Designed for Performance

Alchemy's redesign of Solana is a result of two years of close collaboration with various ecosystem developers. By partnering with teams from Bags.fm, Solflare, and Robinhood, the company identified the specific bottlenecks developers faced when trying to access Solana data and process transactions.

The outcome is a new generation of RPC and Streaming APIs tailored specifically for Solana. The upgraded infrastructure provides 20 times faster archive calls, an impressive uptime of 99.95%, and double the throughput compared to previous versions.

Alchemy’s engineering team has also enhanced the system to manage large data sets more effectively. This improvement allows for nearly instantaneous responses during high transaction workloads, leading to faster user experiences on exchanges, wallets, and analytics platforms reliant on continuous access to on-chain data.

Addressing the Technical Hurdles

Developers working on Solana have often likened the network's complexity to "chewing glass," reflecting the technical challenges they face while building innovative financial products. Even though Solana's core protocol has become more mature, the ancillary tools and infrastructure have frequently been unable to match its pace of development.

Alchemy’s research highlighted that many developers faced hurdles in accessing historical data due to the limitations of Bigtable-based RPC systems, which often resulted in missing records, throttling, or incomplete datasets. This situation led teams to create complex workarounds that hindered progress and increased costs. The new Solana architecture alleviates these constraints, allowing heavy data methods, such as getTransaction and getProgramAccounts, to perform faster while ensuring reliability at scale.

A New Era for Institutional Infrastructure

As ETF adoption escalates and entities like Western Union prepare to introduce a stablecoin on Solana by 2026, the network is moving into a phase where reliability and precision are as vital as speed. By fundamentally reconstructing Solana’s core infrastructure, Alchemy has poised the network to manage sustained institutional traffic and large-scale consumer applications without sacrificing performance.

With the maturation of Solana's ecosystem, Alchemy's significant infrastructure overhaul marks an essential turning point, transitioning the network from "chewing glass" challenges to effectively facilitating finance at scale.