Ep. 759 Solana Is Getting 40X Faster & Here's Why It Matters with SOL Strategies CEO

Sol Strategies CEO Michael Hubbard framed the company as an operating business contributing to Solana, not merely a holder of SOL. It has built validator infrastructure, launched liquid staking in January, and acquired Dark Lake in April and Houdini Swap on June 1. The acquisitions reflect a thesis that Solana’s growth depends on funds moving into and out of the network, and on owning the rails that enable those flows. Sol Strategies says 55% of Houdini’s cross-chain volume touches Solana, including both single-leg swaps and swaps between Solana assets.

The acquisitions also address privacy, which Hubbard considers important as individuals, businesses, institutions, banks, and fund managers enter blockchain. Transactions on public blockchains are not anonymous by default: payment activity can expose a payer’s financial history, while payroll can reveal employee compensation, employer balances, and payment patterns. Hubbard argued that transparency and privacy can coexist, and that users should be able to retain censorship resistance and control of their wealth without exposing all their activity. Private infrastructure will be needed for institutional scale, he said, though not every transaction needs to be private and the sector remains in an early, foundation-building stage.

Dark Lake is developing zero-knowledge privacy technology, while Houdini Swap aggregates private swaps across 120 blockchains, with the goal of breaking the on-chain link between the origin and destination. Brandon said Houdini had surpassed $3 billion in cumulative swap volume and processed more than $260 million. Houdini Pay lets a sender request a specified asset and amount while the payer pays in another asset on a supported blockchain; the service handles the swap without leaving a link between sender and recipient. It is used for invoice payments and peer-to-peer requests, and API integrations are growing.

Solana’s speed improvements combine shorter block times with larger and more capable transactions. Block times have moved down from 400 milliseconds through 350, 300, and 250 milliseconds toward 200 milliseconds, effectively doubling block frequency; the speaker expected 200-millisecond blocks imminently around the episode’s release. Transaction version 1 increased maximum transaction size fourfold, from 1 megabyte to 4 megabytes, allowing more instructions per transaction, and the block compute-unit limit had more than doubled over the prior year. Finality then took 32 blocks—about 12 seconds at 400-millisecond blocks, or 6 seconds at 200 milliseconds. Alpine Glow was expected within weeks and projected to reduce finality to 150 milliseconds, which the speaker described as roughly a 40-fold speedup from the six-second figure. Hubbard cautioned that the effects remain unknown and that Solana’s bandwidth should be assessed as the network approaches saturation; he argued that cuts from seconds to milliseconds can make systems substantially more usable and scalable.

The speakers discussed possible longer trading hours at Nasdaq, from 23/5 or 24/5 to potentially 24/7, but described Nasdaq executing trades on-chain as a future possibility, not a confirmed plan. Projects including xStocks, Securitize, and Superstate are building tokenized securities. Such securities would remain regulated and retain off-chain components such as transfer agents, while on-chain trading could make order routing, execution, counterparties, and intermediaries more transparent. Hubbard said tokenized U.S. stocks could broaden access for people facing brokerage fees or exchange controls. Tokenization had slowed as the industry awaited SEC exemptions; the SEC has since issued guidance, while the Clarity Act remains stalled, and Hubbard expects another iteration.

Sol Strategies voted for a proposal to double Solana’s disinflation rate after an earlier proposal failed. Hubbard supports faster inflation reduction but said the effect may be small and largely aesthetic: he estimated inflation at about 4% and staking rewards at 5–6%, describing inflation as a transfer from unstaked SOL to staked SOL. He also said selling staking rewards to pay taxes is inconsequential relative to daily global SOL trading volume, and cautioned that staking rewards, particularly liquid staking rewards, may not be taxable on receipt in many places; this was not tax advice. He argued that supply changes complicate comparisons of Solana’s market capitalization: the network launched with 500 million SOL in March 2020, burned 10–11 million shortly afterward, and now has about 620 million SOL in existence, roughly 25% more over six and a half years. Although circulating supply doubled, total SOL in existence did not; he cited market-cap peaks of about $70 billion in 2021 and $135 billion in 2024–2025, and said fully diluted market capitalization better reflects the supply comparison.