According to Woofun AI, on November 9, the New York Stock Exchange (ICE.US) announced the selection of Avalanche as the tokenized stock settlement ledger, and Formation declared the establishment of a trading venue on Solana on the same day. The two major institutions promoted the on-chain plan on the same day, triggering the market to re-examine the “old money on the chain” trend.
Judging from the details of the partnership on the Avalanche side, Dennis Lee, head of digital distribution at the NYSE, emphasized that the core of choosing the agreement was its speed, stability, predictable cost, and the most critical control — that is, the ability to decide which institutions access and who runs the node, which cannot be provided by the public chain. As a result, the NYSE does not use the Avalanche public chain, but a dedicated chain tailored to its regulatory requirements.
This architecture places extremely limited demand on AVAX. Before December 2024, dedicated chain verification nodes were required to stake 2,000 AVAX, but then upgraded through Etna, and the threshold was changed to destroy approximately 1.33 AVAX per node per month. Assuming that the NYSE runs 30 nodes, consumes less than 480 AVAX in a year, which is worth about $4,200 at the current price of about $8.66.
According to data compiled by Woofun AI, even with about 850 such nodes across the network, VanEck estimated in September that the total annual destruction value was only about $160,000, which is almost negligible compared to AVAX's market value of about 3.9 billion US dollars.
Although AVAX rose all the way from $7.82 to above $8.85 intraday on the day the news was announced, closing at $8.66, up 9.1% from the previous day's closing, and the number of unclosed contracts surged 26%, this was more of a short-term hype on the narrative by leveraged funds rather than being driven by fundamentals.
In contrast, Solana's solution appears to be closer to the characteristics of public chains. Formation Securities is a newly established securities business. Its predecessor was Formation, which merged the decentralized exchange Orca and loan agreement Loopscale in October of this year. On November 9, the company notified the US Securities Regulatory Commission that it plans to operate a tokenized stock exchange on Solana in early 2027, making it the first such platform on Solana. Its solution allows investors to trade stablecoins around the clock in their wallets through authentication after shares of listed companies are tokenized by Superstate and Securitize (SECZ.US), and the settlement is completed in the same Solana transaction, while retaining dividends and voting rights.
Formation's reasons for choosing Solana include its high speed, low cost, and the more than $5 billion tokenized real-world assets that already exist on the chain. As early as April 2025, Orca joined forces with Superstate and the Solana Policy Institute to submit a public chain stock trading plan to the US Securities Regulatory Commission. This declaration is a continuation of this path. Unlike the NYSE, Formation uses the public Solana network, and each transaction pays SOL as a processing fee. Theoretically, the demand for SOL is more direct.
However, regulatory restrictions have set a strict ceiling on Solana's trading volume. According to the innovation exemption issued by the US Securities Regulatory Commission on September 17, large-cap stocks such as the S&P 500 and Russell 1000 can only be traded at most 75 per venue, and the on-chain volume of each stock must not exceed 0.25% of its average daily turnover in the previous month, that is, only 1 share can be traded on the chain for every 400 shares; other stocks are relaxed to 2.5%, and trading is suspended for three months if the limit is exceeded a second time. Since Solana's single transaction fee is less than 1 cent, compounded by capped transaction volume, it is difficult to expand the market size in the short term.
More notable is the selection of the first targets: Christopher Montagano, president of Formation Securities, said that success presupposes that listed companies see value, but the first ones selected were Exodus (EXOD.US) (crypto wallet), Forward Industries (FWDI.US) (Solana treasury company with around 8.5 million SOL), and Galaxy (GLXY.US) (Forward (GLXY.US)) (Forward (GLXY.US)) (Forward one of the supporters). This shows that initial transactions were mainly driven by related parties in the crypto industry, showing the characteristics of “people lifting their own cars” rather than being driven by broad market demand.
Historical review has further revealed this repetitive script of “exhaustion of benefits.” On September 29, Goldman Sachs (GS.US) announced that its treasury bond fund was connected to the Avalanche special chain. AVAX rose 7.7% to close at $11.44 in a single day, hitting an intraday high of $12.01, hitting a high of $12.01 in the second half of the year.
However, within the next six weeks, the price fell all the way back to around $7.8, a retracement of one-third. The upward trajectory of AVAX triggered by this NYSE cooperation is highly similar, suggesting that institutions are using blockchain technology more for infrastructure efficiency considerations rather than long-term support for token prices.
Wall Street is systematically migrating settlement, escrow, and distribution processes to blockchain. The NYSE, DTCC, Goldman Sachs, and NASDAQ are all advancing related plans within a year, and the regulatory authorities have also provided a five-year exemption framework for this.
Wall Street embraces blockchain's settlement speed and 24/7 transaction capability rather than the token itself. Institutions use self-built private chains or limited public chain applications to transform technology into infrastructure while minimizing the demand and cost of tokens.
This “technology bought, currency price not bought” value divergence explains why it is difficult for crypto projects to achieve epic price breakthroughs even though old money continues to go up the chain. Currently, there are many market catalysts, but there is no fundamental demand drive. Fluctuations in currency prices reflect more short-term narrative hype than long-term value revaluation.