Revolutionizing Finance: Bullish and Solana’s Partnership for On-Chain Stablecoins

Solana Foundation are teaming up to events on chain financial infrastructure with Solana native staple coins at the core.

I spoke to Chris Tyer, president of Bullish Exchange, to hear more about the partnership.

Take a look.

Well, first and foremost, tell us what this partnership means for the future of finance.

Sure, so taking a step back, stablecoins can be issued on many different blockchains.

So let's take USDC as an example that's issued by Circle.

Circle enjoyed a very successful IPO recently, and that stablecoin could be issued on Ethereum on Solana on bases on a multitude of other blockchains.

Historically, the bullish ecosystem is run on Ethereum rails for stablecoins, and so that would mean as clients look to deposit assets with us, deposit stablecoins with us, they'd be using the Ethereum network as we're moving.

Assets around our ecosystem between our broker dealers would be using the Ethereum network and as clients looked at it withdraw assets again they'd be using the Ethereum network.

What we've done is we've shifted our architecture and our infrastructure so that we're going to be running predominantly on Solana rails, and there's a few different reasons why we've done that.

But the first is really client demand.

So Solano has been purpose built.

For large scale financial services and so it's very high performance.

It's very fast.

It's very cost effective, it's cheap to send and it has a massive throughput capacity.

So to give you an example, in terms of transactions per second, Solana can handle about 100 times that of Ethereum.

As a result of that, the cost to move assets are very, very cheap.

And so that appeals to the institutional investors and traders that are transacting on bullish.

But the second reason is we're very culturally aligned as organizations, so Solana, you are really trying, they're building institutional financial services on chain, and they're really quite dominant in doing that and we are bringing institutional trading. to the world as well, so we're very culturally aligned in that sense.

But one of the things that really struck us is how successful Solana has been in its stated mission.

And you know, look, they are building unchained financial services at such a scale that it could accommodate billions of users ultimately that's their stated ambition, and they're doing a really great job of achieving that.

So if you look at the number of developers, Solana is now the most popular ecosystem.

Developers to build upon in terms of app revenue.

Solana is the number one blockchain in terms of app revenue.

It's the number one blockchain in terms of decentralized exchange trading.

It's got the highest volumes and it was just announced yesterday actually that it's now the month of June.

Solana had more monthly active users than every other L1 and L2 put together, so they're really moving the needle for those reasons, you know, we're excited to move our architecture over to Solana.

And for the viewers out there who are wondering what the implications are for Solana native stablecoins, how does it improve transactions and settlements?

Yeah, so this will hopefully generate a lot more activity.

So the institutional investors and traders that we transact with will now have a mechanism to utilize our ecosystem services using Solana.

So we expect a big uptick in activity as a result of this partnership.

And in addition to that, what advantages do you think on chain infrastructure actually offers when compared to traditional systems out there?

Yeah, and so you know if you look at the way the A traders within crypto are utilizing stablecoins.

It's really to move assets around.

So these are, you know, in a lot of cases algorithmic one traders, they're moving assets as fast as they possibly can through a variety of different venues.

The quickest way to do that by far is using blockchain.

It's just a quicker mechanism, but where you get the real uplift is when you go to cross-border transactions, and it's funny.

So I spent 17 years trading commodities and actually you know it's starting to see these two worlds move.

A lot of commodity trade settlement occurs cross border and that can be incredibly frictionful.

It would involve correspondent banks on both sides and sometimes you know that can take weeks to occur.

With with Solana, that settlement, that settlement could be reach finality within 400 milliseconds.

So that has incredible advantages certainly in the cross border space.

And Chris, when it comes to this collaboration between Bullus and Falana, how will this impact users as well as businesses in the ecosystem?

Yeah, so our users will still have the ability to use other other rails, but we will really we're looking to move the majority of our services to Solana to Solana rails.

So again, in terms of, you know, deposits, withdrawals, and the transactions through our ecosystem, we'll all be Solana based from here on.

Well, you have this experience in commodities, so I'm sure there are a lot of parallels when we're talking about the world of digital assets.

So finally, we're here in 2025.

The first half has been quite the volatile year.

What trends are you paying attention to as we had not just in the second half but also the decades beyond?

Yeah, I mean, it's so I think one of the things that we're very excited about is the policy direction here in the US.

What we've seen historically is as soon as you have policy clarity, you get a huge uplift in activity.

We saw this in Switzerland back in 2018.

Remember the Crypto Valley.

You know, we saw that in Singapore with their virtual asset trading platform regime.

We saw that in Europe with Mika, you know, since, since Mika was implemented at the beginning of this year, we've seen Deutsche Bank launch into custody, Commerce Bank launch custody.

BBVA have launched their own stablecoin.

SocGen has launched custody.

SocGen have issued their own stablecoins, and so we're seeing this explosion in activity among traditional financial players, and I think that that's about to occur in the US, and we're incredibly excited about that opportunity.

Well, Chris, great having you here at the New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing your insights.