Solana Research Institute estimates $11.2 billion of FMI revenue could survive onchain shift

The back office of global finance makes a lot of money doing work almost nobody sees. A new report from the Solana Research Institute argues that most of that money would change hands if the work moved onto public blockchains.

The institute, known as SRI, puts the global annual revenue pool for financial market infrastructure (FMI) at $31.5 billion. In a scenario with no regulatory safeguards for existing operators, it estimates only $11.2 billion would stay with today’s incumbents.

The other $20.3 billion, by SRI’s math, would pass to users and new competitors through lower costs.

Where the money goes

Think of FMI as the toll roads of finance. These are the venues and back-office systems that match, clear and settle trades so that buyers get their assets and sellers get paid.

SRI’s report splits that toll revenue into streams, and not all of them face the same risk. Trading is the most exposed.

The institute treats the $13 billion in trading revenue as fully at risk for incumbents. Its view is that competition among onchain markets would likely pull that entire slice away from current players.

Clearing tells a different story. SRI pegs clearing revenue at $10 billion and projects that about $6.8 billion of it would withstand the transition.

Clearing is the job of standing in the middle of a trade and absorbing the damage if one side fails to pay. The report’s reasoning is that longer-term trades still need someone to manage that default risk, blockchain or not.

A post promoting the findings on X framed the surviving share as just over $10.5 billion of traditional infrastructure revenue under an unprotected move onchain. The report’s own breakdown lands at $11.2 billion retained out of $31.5 billion.

The new business lines

The report is not purely a story about incumbents losing out. SRI also identifies four categories of onchain services that could each generate single-digit billions of dollars a year.

The first is cross-venue collateral pooling. In plain terms, that means letting traders use one pot of collateral across multiple platforms instead of parking separate deposits at each one.

The second is prediction market clearing, which applies the default-management role described above to markets where people bet on real-world outcomes.

The third covers high-value cross-border payment settlement assets. These would be onchain instruments used to finalize large international payments.

The fourth is multi-stablecoin acceptance infrastructure. That is the tooling that would let a business take payment in several different stablecoins without juggling each one separately.

Who is behind the numbers

SRI is a Switzerland-based not-for-profit founded in April 2026. It published the FMI report on October 30, 2026, and promoted it on X on November 10, 2026.

Its membership roster includes Angus Scott, the former head of innovation at Euroclear, along with the Solana Foundation, Jito, R3, Figment, Helius and Alchemy.

That lineup blends traditional market plumbing experience with firms deeply embedded in the Solana ecosystem. Readers should weigh the analysis accordingly: the authors have a clear interest in finance moving onto public chains.

What this means

The most important word in the report’s central estimate is “unprotected.” SRI’s $11.2 billion figure assumes regulators do nothing to shield existing operators, and that assumption carries much of the weight.

For the Solana ecosystem and other public-chain builders, the $20.3 billion figure functions as a sizing exercise. It frames the opportunity as savings passed to users and room for new entrants, not as revenue that blockchains automatically capture.

Lower costs for users are a real benefit, but they do not guarantee profits for whoever builds the new rails, since competition is exactly what drives the cost savings in the first place.

The four new service categories are where builders could carve out fresh revenue. Each sits in the single-digit billions annually by SRI’s estimate, which would make them meaningful businesses if they materialize.