Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
The mission of this role is to achieve step-change or breakthrough growth, not to drive natural or marginal growth.
On the job description for the Head of Stablecoins position posted on the recruitment platform Ashby by the Solana Foundation on August 3, there is this statement. The foundation is a nonprofit organization registered in Zug, Switzerland, with the stated mission of promoting the adoption, decentralization, and security of the Solana network—typically not phrased in such a sales-team tone in job postings.
Four other senior roles were released in the same batch, including Head of AI Ecosystem, Head of Institutional Growth for Greater China, Head of Institutional Growth for Japan, and Head of DeFi Growth, all reporting under the growth team responsible for engaging with enterprises, financial institutions, and regulators.
For the Japan role, candidates must be fluent in Japanese and able to build direct relationships with executives at super banks, regulators, and major payment companies. The Greater China role’s title specifies a geographic area, but the description covers the entire Asia-Pacific region—including Japan, China, and Singapore—and requires 7 to 12 years of experience and existing executive-level connections. The stablecoin role seeks candidates who already have established relationships with major issuers, custodians, and market makers, and can design commercial terms and liquidity incentives.
Five positions, covering stablecoins, AI, Asian institutional markets, and DeFi, yet none related to Meme—despite Meme being what drove Solana’s on-chain activity over the past two years. This hiring push signals a strategic shift toward AI, stablecoins, and the Asian institutional market. To understand what an organization truly fears, look less at its roadmap and more at its job postings.
So the question becomes: What is the foundation anxious about?
Ledger ranked fourth in total chain revenue
According to Blockworks' Solana Q2 2026 holder report, the chain's real economic value for Q2 was $51 million, a 43% decline quarter-over-quarter, with monthly figures of $18.6 million in April, $18.1 million in May, and $14.3 million in June, showing a consistent monthly decline. Application-layer revenue totaled $228.4 million, a 31% quarter-over-quarter decrease and the lowest quarter since Q1 2024.
More concerning than the decline is the ranking: by quarterly revenue on a single chain, Solana ranks fourth with a 12% share, behind Hyperliquid’s $141.4 million (33%), TRON’s $89.8 million (21%), and Ethereum’s $63.3 million (15%). For comparison, Solana’s share was 18% in the first quarter.
The composition of revenue is as serious an issue as the total amount: in Q2, Pump.fun, a meme issuance platform, ranked first on the app revenue chart with $90.1 million, accounting for 39% of total app revenue. However, the report also notes that Pump.fun’s revenue share reached a new high precisely because the rest of the market shrank even faster. The entire launchpad category generated $63.9 million in revenue, with Pump.fun alone accounting for 97%.
On July 18, Solana generated more daily network revenue than all other blockchains, reclaiming the top spot on DeFiLlama’s leaderboard, according to SolanaFloor—this is the first time in nearly five months. On that day’s fee leaderboard, Pump.fun led with $2.04 million in daily revenue, more than double the approximately $800,000 recorded during June’s low point, while Solana’s base layer transaction fees amounted to just $568,000.
At this point, the story seems like the classic version: Meme coins fade, blockchains lose users, and foundations hire to find new growth.
New requirements have emerged
In the same quarter, Solana recorded a historic high of $5.8 billion in trading volume for tokenized assets, a 114% quarter-over-quarter increase, with tokenized stocks accounting for $4.8 billion—more than four times the $1.1 billion in Q1. Growth was concentrated at the end of the quarter: $670 million in April, $871 million in May, and $3.3 billion in June alone. The listing of SpaceX on June 12 served as the direct catalyst, with tokenized SPCX issued via Sunrise and distributed through Backpack contributing approximately $770 million in June. Approximately 97% of all tokenized stock trading across chains occurred on Solana.
In June, total-chain DEX trading volume rebounded 26% month-over-month; Blockworks specifically noted that tokenized assets, not memes, drove this rebound.
On the institutional side, 7 of the 29 global systemically important banks have already launched Solana-related services: JPMorgan Chase handles tokenization and DVP settlement; BNY Mellon provides SOL custody and USDC minting/burning; Morgan Stanley offers custody, spot trading, and lending; Société Générale issues stablecoins; and State Street manages money market funds. In Q2, spot SOL ETPs saw net inflows of $120 million, while spot Bitcoin ETPs recorded net outflows of $3.7 billion and Ethereum ETPs saw net outflows of $500 million. Amid widespread market declines, this逆势 capital inflow serves as concrete evidence of genuine demand.
But volume is rising, user demographics are improving, institutions are entering, yet revenue has dropped by 43%. The reason lies in the revenue rankings: the top five apps in Q2 were Pump.fun ($90.1 million), Collector Crypt ($32.2 million), Pacifica ($20 million), Jupiter ($15.3 million), and Phantom wallet ($11.9 million). None of the apps related to $4.8 billion in tokenized stock trading made it into the top five.
In other words, Solana’s transition has already become evident in trading volume, yet it has not yet shown up on the income statement. Tokenized stocks are supported by proprietary AMMs operated by professional market makers, which account for approximately half of the trading volume in tokenized assets. These platforms earn profits through spreads and charge fees significantly lower than the priority fees and tips seen in Meme token trading.
Five positions are filling the same gap.
Looking back at the job postings through this contradiction, the logic of the five positions becomes complete—they are all seeking billable forms for non-speculative demand.
Stablecoins are the first to be affected, as they form the funding layer for all on-chain financial activities and also experienced the longest downtime on Solana. At the end of Q2, the on-chain stablecoin supply on Solana stood at $16.3 billion, rising only 2% quarter-over-quarter and remaining largely flat amid four consecutive quarters of declining activity. Transfer volume reached $1.5 trillion, a 29% quarter-over-quarter decline.
In DefiLlama’s同期 chain-specific data, Ethereum holds approximately $154 billion, Tron about $9 billion, and Solana an order of magnitude less. The phrase “step-change growth” directly targets this lagging and modest figure. Amid a quarter of generally declining loan balances, the yield-bearing stablecoin market was the only clear source of new capital. The head of DeFi growth is responsible for the lower half of this line—money sitting idle in wallets generates no income; fees only begin when it flows into lending, trading, or market making.
The two Asian institutional roles correspond to sources of volume; the seven systemically important banks have merely opened the door—expanding it into a channel requires someone to be based year-round in Tokyo and Hong Kong, negotiating with regulators and bank executives. The technical leverage is already in place: the consensus-layer upgrade, the Alpenglow plan, is set to go live around August alongside Agave v4.2, reducing transaction confirmation time to 150 milliseconds—a roughly hundredfold improvement over current levels. Millisecond-level settlement is something that can be brought to the negotiating table, and the timing of these two roles being opened is unlikely to be coincidental.
The head of the AI ecosystem appears to be chasing trends, but is actually the role closest to revenue generation among these positions. Google Cloud and the Solana Foundation jointly launched Pay.sh in Q2—a pay-per-use stablecoin payment channel for AI agents. Amazon Web Services has also rolled out a stablecoin billing system for AI traffic. Blockworks has dubbed this direction the quarter’s “biggest new frontier” in payments.
As of publication, the Solana Foundation has not issued a public statement regarding the overall strategic intent behind this round of hiring. Some AI ecosystem roles have already stopped accepting applications on aggregated job boards; the actual status should be confirmed on the Foundation’s official job page.
Summary
At the end of the report, Blockworks split Solana in half: revenue tied to speculative velocity is being repriced, while demand tied to settlement is growing in the same environment.
The Q3 report will be the first report card, and there’s only one number to watch: has Pump.fun’s 39% share of application revenue declined? Among tokenized stocks, stablecoin payments, and AI agent payments—will any project appear in the top five revenue rankings for the first time under its own name?
Before that, "stepwise growth" was just a phrase written on the careers page.