NYSE Selects Avalanche, New Platforms Bet on Solana: The "Old Chains, New Uses" Trend Won't Boost Coin Prices
Old money goes on-chain, old coins do the lifting
By Curry, TechFlow
TechFlow Overview:
On November 9, the New York Stock Exchange selected Avalanche for tokenized stock settlement, sending AVAX up by as much as ~10%. Later that day, Formation filed to launch a tokenized stock trading venue on Solana. However, under regulatory rules, large-cap stocks can have at most one tokenized share traded on-chain for every 400 shares.
If you saw AVAX form a massive bullish candle yesterday, the culprit was the NYSE.
On November 9, Ava Labs announced that the New York Stock Exchange’s upcoming tokenized stock platform had chosen Avalanche as the ledger for clearing and settlement. The platform aims for round-the-clock trading and is still awaiting regulatory approval.
AVAX surged from $7.82 to $8.85 that day, peaking at roughly a 10% gain. Open interest in futures contracts jumped by approximately 26% on the same day, with Binance and Bybit accounting for 77% of the volume. The first money to pour in was clearly leveraged capital speculating on the narrative.
The same day brought good news for Solana as well.
A new company called Formation Securities notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of its plans to operate a tokenized stock trading venue on Solana, aiming to launch in early 2027.
Pulled together, these two developments reignite the trend of old money moving on-chain while legacy tokens get rehashed and pumped.
But after reviewing the actual proposals from both sides, you might not be so optimistic about the conclusion. Wall Street is indeed going on-chain, but mostly onto private or controlled networks. Capital flows first into companies selling technology and distribution channels, leaving little that actually empowers and materially impacts the coin price.
The NYSE Is Buying the Technology Itself, With Minimal Impact on AVAX
According to partnership details, the NYSE is not using the Avalanche public chain, but rather a dedicated chain customized to meet its own regulatory requirements. The NYSE alone decides which institutions can connect and who operates the nodes.
Dennis Lee, Head of Digital Issuance at the NYSE, cited the reasons for choosing Avalanche: speed, stability, predictable upfront costs, and the ability to control access. The key point ultimately lies in control over this specific chain—a capability a public chain obviously cannot provide.
So how much toll will this chain pay to AVAX?
The answer is very little, and set by Avalanche itself. Prior to December 2024, each validator node for such a dedicated chain had to stake 2,000 AVAX tokens. Institutions wanting to go on-chain had to first buy them on the market. To attract corporate adoption that year, Avalanche removed this barrier with the Etna upgrade, replacing it with a monthly fee of approximately 1.33 AVAX per node, which is subsequently burned. Network fees can also be paid using the native token.
Assuming the NYSE operates 30 nodes, it would burn fewer than 480 AVAX annually. Valued at around $4,000, this figure is practically insignificant when stacked against AVAX's ~$3.9 billion market cap...
The entire network faces a similar scale. According to VanEck's September estimates, approximately 850 such nodes contribute a combined total of around $160,000 to the mainnet over a year. Therefore, while institutions have indeed arrived, they are no longer heavily reliant on buying AVAX.
Solana Got the Ticket, But Not the Volume
In comparison, the Solana approach looks more like what a public chain should offer.
Formation is not an established Wall Street firm, but a veteran player on Solana. In October this year, Solana-based DEX Orca merged with lending protocol Loopscale to form Formation. Formation Securities, the entity filing this notice, is its newly established securities division, with trading technology directly licensed from Orca.
On November 9, Formation Securities notified the SEC of its intention to operate a tokenized stock trading venue on Solana, claiming it as the first of its kind on the network.
The proposal roughly works as follows:
Once a publicly listed company approves, issuers Superstate and Securitize convert the shares into tokens. After passing identity verification, investors hold the tokenized shares in their wallets and trade them 24/7 using stablecoins. Settlement for both the shares and funds occurs within a single Solana transaction. Dividends and voting rights remain identical to common shares, and the tokenized shares can be utilized in approved on-chain applications. The pilot program initially lists three companies, with trading slated to begin in early 2027.
Why choose Solana?
Formation provides three reasons: speed, low cost, and the fact that Solana already hosts over $5 billion in tokenized real-world assets. They’ve been paving this road for over a year and a half; in April 2025, Orca jointly submitted a proposal to the SEC with Superstate and the Solana Policy Institute for trading stocks on a public chain.
The biggest difference from the NYSE setup is that this uses the public Solana chain, with barriers only applied to liquidity pools. Every execution is a native Solana transaction, with fees paid in SOL.
This confidence stems from the Innovation Exemption released by the SEC on September 17. The exemption requires trading contracts to be deployed on a public chain, effectively reserving a seat for public chains.
However, regulators clearly do not intend to let on-chain U.S. equities scale overnight.
For large-cap indices like the S&P 500 and Russell 1000, a single venue can list a maximum of 75 tickers, and the on-chain trading volume for each cannot exceed 0.25% of its previous month's daily average. In other words, out of every 400 executed trades, no more than one can clear on-chain. Other stocks are allowed up to 2.5%. Any second breach results in an immediate three-month trading halt.
Given that a single Solana transaction fee is already less than one cent, multiplied by this capped trading volume, this pie simply won't grow significantly in the short term.
As for the first three stocks selected, the situation is even more telling. "For tokenized equities to succeed, listed companies must first see the value in them," said Christopher Montagano, President of Formation Securities.
Yet he has lined up shares from Exodus, Forward Industries, and Galaxy. One builds crypto wallets, another is a Solana treasury firm holding roughly 8.5 million SOL, and the third is among the backers backing Forward.
Put plainly, the first batch of U.S. stocks trading on Solana are being propelled by insiders from the crypto ecosystem itself.
A Familiar Recipe
If you chased the Goldman Sachs rally back in September, this run-up for AVAX should look familiar.
On September 29, Goldman Sachs connected its Treasury fund to an Avalanche dedicated chain, sending AVAX surging ~12% in a single day to a six-month high of $11.92. Over the following six weeks, it steadily fell back to around $7.80, retracing roughly a third of its gains. This time around, the NYSE deal reads like the opening act of the exact same script.
Now, crypto is undeniably being embraced by Wall Street. Within just a year, the NYSE, DTCC, Goldman Sachs, and Nasdaq have all begun migrating clearing, custody, and distribution processes onto blockchain networks. Regulators have also carved out a dedicated five-year exemption. This blockchain technology is rapidly evolving into core Wall Street infrastructure.
It's just that the manner of acceptance isn't the kind everyone hopes for—by which I mean, the kind that drives long-term sustainable appreciation for coin prices.
Old money wants the settlement speed and 24/7 trading capabilities of blockchain, not the tokens themselves. They build their own private chains, paying only a modest fee for token usage; even when utilizing public chains, trading volumes are strictly capped by regulation.
The technology gets purchased, but the token price doesn't automatically follow. This disconnect may be why currently surviving crypto projects can experience temporary catalysts, yet fail to trigger truly epic, paradigm-shifting growth.