RWA+ETF Dual Drive: Could Solana Become the Biggest Dark Horse in the Second Half of the Year?

In the second half of 2025, RWA is increasingly being regarded by more institutions as the "next main line" in the crypto market. Wall Street giants like JPMorgan and BlackRock have entered the space through products such as stablecoins and tokenized government bonds, and the boundaries of on-chain finance are being fully infiltrated by real assets. According to data from Messari and DefiLlama, the on-chain (TVL) for the RWA track has surpassed $11 billion and has maintained a 60%+ annualized growth over the past year.

Ethereum remains the absolute leader in RWA — leveraging a mature DeFi ecosystem and compliant infrastructure, it holds over 70% of the RWA market share. Representative projects include MakerDAO (government bonds), Ondo Finance (bonds + US stocks), Centrifuge (supply chain finance), among others.

However, high Gas fees and network congestion have prompted some emerging RWA protocols to seek more efficient and lower-cost public chains.

With transaction fees below $0.01 and high concurrent processing capabilities, Solana's growth rate in the RWA field ranks among the top two. Active on-chain RWA projects include tokenization of government bonds (such as Superstate), stablecoin issuance (both USDC and PYUSD have been deployed), and tokenized assets of gold and commodities. According to The Block data, Solana's RWA-related trading volume increased by about 260% year-on-year in the first half of 2025. Although the current market cap share of RWA is still less than 5%, its growth rate far exceeds that of older competitors like Ethereum and BNB Chain.

Notably, the market generally expects that Solana's spot ETF is likely to be approved in the coming months with a probability as high as 90%, potentially bringing in a massive influx of institutional funds similar to the Bitcoin ETF in 2024. Combined with the rapid expansion of RWA, Solana may simultaneously experience dual drives in valuation and market share.

Other Potential Competitors

• Hedera: Collaboration with traditional financial institutions for pilot projects, but its ecosystem's heat and open liquidity are not as strong as Solana's

• Pendle: Yield trading protocol that rapidly expands through tokenized interest flows on Ethereum and L2, but its positioning is at the derivatives layer rather than the foundational settlement layer

• Avalanche: Clearly advantageous in government and corporate blockchain transformation projects

If the sentiment in the RWA sector explodes in the second half of the year, Ethereum will continue to take the largest slice of the pie, but Solana's high performance + low fees + ETF expectations could enable it to become a major dark horse!