Solana Foundation Opens Five Senior Positions, Revealing Post-Meme Survival Strategy

Five positions covering stablecoins, AI, Asian institutions, and DeFi

Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

"The mission of this position is to achieve leapfrog/breakthrough growth, not to drive natural or marginal growth."

This statement is found in the job description for the Head of Stablecoins position posted by the Solana Foundation on the recruitment platform Ashby on August 3. The foundation is a non-profit organization registered in Zug, Switzerland, with the nominal responsibility of promoting the adoption, decentralization, and security of the Solana network, and typically does not use such a sales team-like tone in its job postings.

The same batch of senior positions includes four others: Head of AI Ecosystem, Head of Institutional Growth for Greater China, Head of Institutional Growth for Japan, and Head of DeFi Growth, all listed under the growth team responsible for liaising with enterprises, financial institutions, and regulators.

In terms of position details, the Japanese position requires candidates to be fluent in Japanese and able to establish direct relationships with executives from major banks, regulators, and large payment companies; the Greater China position specifies the region but covers the entire Asia-Pacific area including Japan, China, and Singapore, requiring 7 to 12 years of experience and an existing executive network. The stablecoin position hopes candidates already have relationships with major issuers, custodians, and market makers, capable of designing commercial terms and liquidity incentives.

Five positions cover stablecoins, AI, Asian institutions, and DeFi, yet none are related to Meme. However, Meme has been the very thing that sustained Solana's on-chain activity over the past two years. This recruitment marks a strategic shift towards expanding into AI, stablecoins, and the Asian institutional market. To understand what an organization is truly anxious about, looking at its roadmap is less revealing than examining its job postings.

So the question becomes: What is the foundation anxious about?

Fourth in Total Chain Revenue

According to Blockworks' Solana Q2 2026 Holder Report, the real economic value of the chain in Q2 was $51 million, a 43% decrease quarter-over-quarter, with $18.6 million in April, $18.1 million in May, and $14.3 million in June, showing a month-on-month decline. Application layer revenue was $228.4 million, a 31% decrease, marking the lowest quarter since Q1 2024.

More concerning than the drop in revenue is the ranking; based on single-chain quarterly revenue, 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%). In comparison, Solana's share was 18% in Q1.

The issues of revenue composition and total amount are equally serious; in Q2, the top application revenue came from the Meme issuance platform Pump.fun, with $90.1 million, accounting for 39% of total application revenue. However, the report also pointed out that Pump.fun's revenue share reached a new high precisely because the rest of the market shrank faster. The overall revenue for the launchpad category was $63.9 million, with Pump.fun alone accounting for 97%.

On July 18, Solana's daily network revenue exceeded all other blockchains, reclaiming the top spot on the DeFiLlama leaderboard, with SolanaFloor stating this was the first time in five months. On that day, Pump.fun led the fee chart with $2.04 million, more than double the daily revenue of about $800,000 during the June low, while Solana's base layer transaction fees were only $568,000.

At this point, the story seems to follow the old narrative: Meme recedes, public chains bleed, and the foundation hires to find new growth.

New Demands Have Emerged

In the same quarter, Solana's tokenized asset transaction volume reached a historic high of $5.8 billion, a 114% quarter-over-quarter increase, with tokenized stocks at $4.8 billion, more than four times the $1.1 billion in Q1. The growth was concentrated at the end of the quarter, with $670 million in April, $871 million in May, and $3.3 billion in June, with the June 12 listing of SpaceX acting as a direct catalyst, contributing about $770 million through the tokenized SPCX issued via Sunrise and distributed by Backpack. Approximately 97% of tokenized stock trading occurred on Solana.

In June, the total DEX transaction volume on the chain rebounded by 26%, with Blockworks specifically noting that the driving force behind this rebound was tokenized assets, not Meme.

On the institutional side, among the 29 globally systemically important banks, 7 have already launched Solana-related businesses, with JPMorgan handling tokenization and settlement, BNY Mellon providing SOL custody and USDC minting, Morgan Stanley offering custody, spot trading, and lending, and Société Générale issuing stablecoins, while State Street is involved in money market funds. In Q2, SOL spot ETP saw a net inflow of $120 million, while Bitcoin spot ETP had a net outflow of $3.7 billion and Ethereum had a net outflow of $500 million. In a generally declining market, this reverse trend in capital inflow serves as hard evidence of real demand.

However, while transaction volume is increasing, user structure is improving, and institutions are entering, revenue has dropped by 43%. The reason lies in the ranking of the revenue list; the top five application revenues in Q2 were Pump.fun ($90.1 million), trading card market Collector Crypt ($32.2 million), Pacifica ($20 million), Jupiter ($15.3 million), and wallet Phantom ($11.9 million). Despite $4.8 billion in tokenized stock transactions, none of the related applications made it into the top five.

In other words, Solana's transformation has already manifested in transaction volume but has not yet been reflected in the revenue table. Tokenized stocks are operated by proprietary AMMs run by professional market makers, which contribute about half of the transaction volume for tokenized assets; they earn from spreads, and the fees they take are far lower than the priority fees and tips in Meme trading.

The Five Positions Address the Same Gap

Looking back at the job posting through this contradiction, the logic of the five positions becomes complete; they are all seeking chargeable forms for non-speculative demand.

Stablecoins are the first area to be addressed because they are the funding layer for all on-chain financial activities and have also been stagnant for the longest time on Solana. By the end of Q2, the supply of stablecoins on the Solana chain was $16.3 billion, a mere 2% increase quarter-over-quarter, remaining basically flat amid a backdrop of declining activity for four consecutive quarters. The transfer volume was $1.5 trillion, a 29% quarter-over-quarter decrease.

In the same period's DefiLlama chain data, Ethereum held about $154 billion, Tron about $90 billion, while Solana lagged by an order of magnitude. The phrase "leapfrog growth" directly addresses this lagging and short number. In a quarter where lending balances generally declined, the yield-bearing stablecoin market was the only clear source of new funds. The DeFi Growth Head will take on the latter half of this line, as money sitting in wallets generates no income; only when it flows into lending, trading, or market-making does it start to incur fees.

The two Asian institutional positions correspond to the source of volume; the seven systemically important banks have only opened the door, but expanding that door into a channel requires someone to sit in Tokyo and Hong Kong year-round, negotiating with regulators and bank executives. The technical side has also been prepared; the consensus layer upgrade Alpenglow plan is set to launch with Agave v4.2 around August, reducing transaction confirmation times to 150 milliseconds, about a hundred times better than the current situation. Millisecond-level settlement is something that can be put on the negotiation table, and the timing of these two positions being opened is likely not a coincidence.

The AI Ecosystem Head appears to be the most opportunistic, but in reality, it is the position closest to revenue among this batch. Google Cloud and the Solana Foundation jointly launched Pay.sh in Q2, a pay-per-use stablecoin payment channel aimed at AI entities, while Amazon Cloud also launched a stablecoin system for AI traffic billing. Blockworks referred to this direction as the "biggest new frontier" in payment business for the quarter.

As of the time of publication, the Solana Foundation has not publicly commented on the overall strategic intent of this recruitment batch, and the AI ecosystem position has shown as stopped accepting applications on some aggregated job sites; the actual status should be confirmed on the foundation's official job page.

Conclusion

At the end of the report, Blockworks divided Solana into two halves, with revenue tied to speculative speed being repriced, while demand tied to settlement is growing in the same environment.

The Q3 report will be the first report card, and the only number to watch is whether Pump.fun's 39% share of application revenue declines. Among the three lines of tokenized stocks, stablecoin payments, and AI entity payments, will there be projects that first appear in the top five of the revenue list with their own names?

Until then, "leapfrog growth" remains just a phrase written on a job webpage.