What to Know
- Grayscale’s Solana ETF (GSOL) opens the door for traditional investors.
- Helius Labs makes 493B transactions searchable at lightning speed.
- Western Union goes all-in on Solana with its USDPT stablecoin plans.
Solana (SOL) has had a crazy 24 hours. Some big announcements made waves Western Union exclusively on Solana, ETFs giving traditional investors access, Visa bringing more stablecoins to Solana and an underlying infrastructure upgrade making hundreds of billions of transactions searchable like never before.
Can Grayscale Solana ETF Have a Successful Debut?
The Grayscale Investments Solana Trust ETF (Ticker: GSOL) is set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange Arca today, giving U.S. investors direct exposure to SOL, including potential staking rewards. The fund holds Solana tokens and lets traditional brokers participate in SOL’s upside without directly buying and holding the token themselves.
According to Grayscale’s own factsheet, investors in GSOL get exposure to one of the fastest-growing blockchains with staking yield potential built in. With the ETF ready to launch, Solana’s ecosystem is now opening wider to mainstream finance.
Additionally, yesterday Bitwise’s Solana ETF BSOL drew $69.5M in debut inflows. The fund’s low 0.20% fee and direct staking approach contrasts with Rex-Osprey’s Solana Staking ETF, which will also affect GSOL in a good way.
Helius Labs Indexing Breakthrough
Helius Labs revealed that they’ve launched getTransactionsForAddress, a new RPC method that reduces query times to make 493 billion Solana transactions searchable by account at “Web2 speed”. The X post by Helius Labs co-founder explains how Solana transactions typically reference multiple accounts, and to query the history of “account X” means scanning an enormous haystack of data. Their solution was to build a custom index, one entry per pair. They currently hold over 2.3 trillion rows in this index, yet the median lookup time is about 8 ms under production load.
This is no small feat, designed to make data access fast, efficient, and scalable. And it means devs and applications on Solana will benefit from much faster search, history and analytics. It’s the kind of infrastructure upgrade that underpins long-term network growth.
Visa Stablecoins
Visa is planning to add four new stablecoins across four blockchains, expanding its digital asset infrastructure and global payment reach. While McInerney didn’t disclose which stablecoins or networks would be included, the update expands on Visa’s existing integrations.
The company currently supports Circle’s USDC and Euro Coin (EURC), PayPal’s PYUSD, and Global Dollar (USDG) across Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche. Visa’s stablecoin ambitions have accelerated sharply over the past year. McInerney highlighted “particular momentum” in the sector, revealing that Visa has facilitated over $140 billion in crypto and stablecoin flows since 2020.
Price Action
Despite all the good news, Solana (SOL) slipped 3.18% in the past 24 hours to $192, underperforming the broader crypto market, which dropped about 1.07%. At the time of writing, SOL is currently trading at $195.45.
Investors are cautious as Rate cuts typically boost risk assets, but markets now price a 40% chance of another cut by December, creating uncertainty. Solana’s higher beta amplifies downside during risk-off shifts, as seen in its steeper drop vs. BTC/ETH. SOL also broke below its 30-day SMA ($203.67) and 7-day EMA ($194.44), signalling neutral-to-bearish momentum. The $205.42 Fibonacci level held as resistance, thus the selling pressure. Despite debut inflows of $69.5M in Bitwise’s Solana ETF BSOL and Visa is expanding stablecoin support to Solana, and Western Union plans a Solana-based stablecoin for 2026. However, these long-term bullish catalysts were overshadowed by macro fears.
What to Watch For
In the next few weeks, everyone will be watching the trading volume and investor interest that Grayscale’s GSOL ETF gets when it starts trading, as well as how developers use Helius’s new indexing system to make faster, easier-to-use features like account histories, analytics, and wallet tools. These changes could work together to help Solana’s growing ecosystem get more users and gain more liquidity.
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