The Solana Research Institute (SRI) estimates that exchanges, clearing houses and settlement systems would keep about a third of their revenue on public blockchains. The Swiss-based research body announced the model on X on 10 November 2026, from a report posted on its site on 30 October. SRI puts the yearly revenue pool at roughly $31.5bn. Without regulation that protects incumbents, SRI expects about $11.2bn to survive and $20.3bn to pass to users as lower costs or to new competitors.
The report, written by SRI founder Angus Scott, covers financial market infrastructures, or FMIs: the exchanges, clearing houses, settlement systems and central securities depositories that sit underneath every trade in stocks, bonds and derivatives. SRI's case is that public blockchains turn the operational side of that work into a commodity, while legal standing and network effects keep their value.
How SRI splits the $31.5bn between clearing and trading
In its announcement thread, SRI breaks the estimate down by function, and the two biggest lines move in opposite directions. Clearing, which SRI sizes at $10bn a year, keeps about $6.8bn. Trades that run over time, such as futures, still need someone to manage the risk that one side defaults before the contract ends.
Trading is where SRI expects incumbents to lose everything. It puts trading revenue at $13bn and says all of it goes. On a public blockchain, SRI argues, even the largest exchange "starts with an empty order book" and has to win every order on price and depth against any rival that can plug into the same network.
That trading point is already being tested on Solana SOL$81.86-6.4%. Formation Securities has notified the SEC of a plan to run a tokenized securities venue on Solana, and Fidelity Digital Assets has compared Solana's weekly trade count with that of major stock exchanges.
Four new onchain services SRI says could replace lost FMI revenue
SRI's thread says the $20.3bn figure leaves out new business that only exists onchain. It names four services, each of which it says could be worth single-digit billions of dollars a year:
- one pool of collateral that traders can use across many DeFi venues at once
- clearing for prediction markets
- settlement assets for high-value cross-border payments
- infrastructure that lets banks and merchants accept many different stablecoins
Together, SRI says, these could come close to or match the revenue incumbents lose. Its view is that the advantage goes to whoever builds a network of users first, though incumbents start with established brands and regulatory standing.
Why legal finality keeps exchanges and depositories relevant onchain
The report opens with the London Metal Exchange's nickel crisis of 8 March 2022. SRI recounts that nickel jumped from about $30,000 a tonne to over $100,000, the LME suspended trading at 08:15 and cancelled that day's trades, and in doing so averted what it estimated would have been the default of 12 of its 45 clearing members. In SRI's telling, the episode shows an FMI using legal powers that code alone would not have.
That legal layer is where SRI expects value to remain. The report notes that many jurisdictions do not yet treat tokens as legal property, and settlement finality, the guarantee that a completed transfer cannot be unwound if a counterparty goes bust, may only be available through a regulated FMI. SRI proposes two new roles: "technical listing authorities" that certify an issuer's identity and the standards its token contracts meet, and "settlement notaries" that confer legal finality on trades settled onchain.
SRI is critical of rules that bundle several functions inside a central securities depository: notarising issues, transferring legal title, granting settlement finality and supplying low-risk cash for the payment leg. "This feels wrong in principle," the report says. Access controls can be built into a public-chain FMI, SRI adds, which makes restricting access "a management decision, not a logistical necessity."
To check feasibility, SRI tested its proposed onchain FMI against all 24 of the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures, the international standard set by the CPMI and IOSCO in 2012. It says it "identified no fundamental barrier to an FMI that operated on public blockchain."
ASX, SIX Digital Exchange and DTCC: how incumbents respond to blockchain
SRI is blunt about past attempts. It says the Australian Securities Exchange wrote off "a quarter of a billion Aussie dollars" on a failed distributed-ledger replacement for its CHESS settlement system; ASX booked a pre-tax charge of A$245m to A$255m when it scrapped the project in November 2022. The report adds that SIX Digital Exchange "delivered genuine world-firsts and still failed to build a viable business." SIX folded SDX into its main exchange and post-trade divisions in October 2025.
SRI sets out four strategies open to incumbents: lobby to keep regulatory protections, defend a genuine legal or market chokepoint, own the standards future business will run on, or wait and acquire the winners. Its thread gives DTCC as the example of the second. In SRI's account, DTCC's tokenization pilot builds on its role as holder of record for most US securities, which gives tokenized versions legal protections that directly issued tokens lack. The risk for incumbents runs the other way too: a newcomer can pick up the ability to serve the legacy business "as a byproduct and on its own timetable rather than the incumbent's," the report says.
What the SRI model means for tokenized assets on Solana
The report is about public blockchains in general, and its numbers are SRI's own modelled estimates. The full report sits behind an email sign-up; this article works from SRI's summary page and announcement thread. The report's Solana example is one we have followed closely: Baillie Gifford's Bagey fund uses Solana and Ethereum as the official record of ownership. For a fund like that, the chain already does the registry work a depository would otherwise do.
SRI was launched in April 2026 by Scott, a former Euroclear executive, with the Solana Foundation, Jito, R3 and Figment among the contributors to its launch. It describes itself as an independent, member-owned association whose views are its own rather than its members'. It is a separate body from the Solana Policy Institute.
The things to watch are whether the regulatory protections SRI's model removes start to change, and which of its four new services finds a builder first.
Disclosure: Solana Compass is a member of the Solana Research Institute and is among the members thanked in SRI's announcement thread.
