Solana ETFs took a record $188m, and Bitwise took two thirds of it

US spot Solana ETFs took in a record $188m in the week to 25 September, and one issuer took two thirds of it. Bitwise's BSOL accounted for about $128m. Six other issuers split what was left.

“The speed, the throughput, the finality of Solana makes it seem extraordinarily attractive. Solana literally gets to finality in the blink of an eye.”

— Matt Hougan, Bitwise

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise

Where the week's money landed:

• Bitwise BSOL: about $128m, which is 68% of the week.
• Grayscale GSOL: $28m. Fidelity FSOL: $18m.
• Morgan Stanley, VanEck, Franklin Templeton and 21Shares: $14m between the four of them.
• Friday alone brought about $87m, of which Bitwise took $56m and Grayscale $19m.

Four asset managers with household names collected $14m between them, an average of $3.5m each, or 7.4% of the week. Bitwise alone took 9.1 times what those four managed together. Across the life of these funds the pattern holds: $1.2bn of the group's $1.6bn in cumulative inflows has gone to one product, a 76% share.

The blink of an eye is a roadmap

Hougan made that case for Solana in an interview, and it is worth testing against the network as it runs today. Payment finality on Solana takes about 12.8 seconds. The 150 milliseconds that would make the blink-of-an-eye line literal belong to Alpenglow, an upgrade that reached its second public testing environment on Friday and is not live on mainnet. The target is 85.3 times faster than the network's current finality, which is a real engineering claim and a future one. It is also the argument of the firm that collected two thirds of the week's money.

A record, measured against the others

Bitcoin ETFs took about $2.4bn in the same week and ether products about $690m, so Solana's record week came to 7.8% of bitcoin's and 27.2% of ether's. We have been counting the bitcoin flows daily and single sessions there have run larger than Solana's entire record week.

SOL traded near $119 in Monday's Asian morning, roughly 60% below its record close to $293, while $1.6bn has arrived in these funds since launch. Inflow and price are separate stories, and we measured how far apart they can travel: five years after the first bitcoin ETF listed, the coin was up 19.2% and its holders were down 11.9%. A fund taking in money says buyers are arriving at the current price. It says nothing about where that price came from, and in this case it came down 60% to get here.

Friday carried $87m of the $188m, which is 46.3% of the week in one session, and Friday was also the day Alpenglow moved to its second testnet. The two events share a date rather than a demonstrated link. What the numbers do establish is narrower and more useful: demand for a Solana ETF exists, it runs at single-digit percentages of bitcoin's, and so far it has mostly meant demand for one fund.

Informational material, not investment advice. Flow figures cover the week to 25 September, and Alpenglow is in public testing rather than live on mainnet.