Ondo, Solana, XRP and Hedera: How Far Wall Street Got in One Week

Wall Street’s interest in crypto is no longer just conference talk. In one week in late September, BlackRock-designed portfolios went on chain through Ondo, Solana funds posted their biggest week of inflows, and the London Stock Exchange Group took a seat helping run the Canton network.

The video grades six projects on one question: did big money actually put its hands on the coin, or is it still talk? It also asks a harder question of ordinary holders. When institutions buy the same coin you hold, what are their coins doing that yours aren’t?

The six grades at a glance

Here is how the video scored each project for the week, from lightest to most direct institutional involvement.

Project	What happened	The video’s grade
Bittensor (TAO)	Subnets reporting real customer revenue	Talk plus first proper earnings, no Wall Street launch
Hedera (HBAR)	Stand at the Sibos banking conference, bank council members present	In the room with the banks, but no money going in
XRP	Batch upgrade had a date, then slipped	A real date that can still slip
Canton	DTCC go-live set for October, LSEG joins as super validator	Being built into Wall Street’s plumbing
Solana (SOL)	$188 million ETF inflow week, fund stakes its coins	Wall Street’s own money going in
Ondo	Tokenized portfolios built on BlackRock strategies	The most direct touch of the six

Bittensor: first real earnings, no Wall Street launch

Bittensor earned the lightest grade because nothing from Wall Street launched for it that week. The network pays people in its own coin, TAO, for AI work that is split into “subnets”, each doing a different job. A co-founder described subnets on Grayscale’s channel as groups of miners that check each other’s work, with tasks ranging from trading to training machine learning models to gathering data.

According to a tracker cited in the video, 24 subnets are earning between $28 million and $35 million a year from paying customers. On September 21, one subnet had its first $10,000 day.

Solana: record ETF inflows and staked coins

Solana is where institutional money showed up. In the five trading days to September 25, Solana ETFs took in $188 million, their biggest week since launch. Bitwise’s fund took about $128 million of that. An ETF is a fund you buy like a share through a normal broker, and the fund holds the coins.

The more useful detail is what happens after the fund buys. Bitwise’s chief investment officer, Matt Hougan, explained the process: when demand for the ETF rises, market makers send Bitwise cash, and Bitwise uses it to buy Solana. “We put it in cold storage and we stake it,” he said.

Staking means locking up coins to help run the network in return for more of the same coin, a bit like a savings account that pays its interest in Solana. When Bitwise launched the fund, it said it aims to stake 100% of the Solana it holds. The video’s point: the fund’s coins go to work the day they are bought, while many retail holders leave theirs sitting on an exchange.

Canton: DTCC picks a blockchain

Canton scored highly because it is being built into Wall Street’s back office. DTCC keeps the records of who owns what in the US stock market. Its chief executive said DTCC holds about $100 trillion in assets for the industry, and that it decided to start tokenizing at the foundational level rather than let members do it in a scattered way that could split up liquidity.

Last December, the SEC issued a no-action letter allowing DTCC to put a segment of its holdings on chain, including US Treasuries, a portion of equities and some ETFs. A representative of Digital Asset, the firm behind Canton, said on Capitol Hill that this is going live in October, and that Canton is the first blockchain DTCC identified for it. Canton’s own site lists October.

Then on September 22, Canton’s members voted in the London Stock Exchange Group as a “super validator”, one of the firms that runs the network and has a say in its rules.

Ondo: BlackRock strategies in a single token

Ondo got the most direct grade. In February, Ondo’s president sat on a stage with BlackRock and talked about model portfolios, the diversified mixes that traditional advisers have used for years, and how most crypto investors have never had one.

On September 24, Ondo launched Ondo Intelligence Portfolios: three portfolios built on strategies BlackRock developed for Ondo, ranging from high income to high growth. Each is packed into a single token, live on Ethereum and BNB Chain, and each token’s name starts with BLK, BlackRock’s stock ticker. The tokens can be sent wallet to wallet like a stablecoin.

There are important limits:

• They are only for eligible investors outside the US, so most Americans cannot buy them.
• According to CryptoSlate’s review of the terms, holding the token gives you no right to the funds or shares underneath it.
• Only eligible non-US investors who have passed Ondo’s checks can cash out with Ondo directly. Everyone else needs to find another buyer.

On launch day, Ondo’s acting chief executive said more portfolios are coming over the next few months, mixing stocks, commodities, ETFs and even prediction markets.

BlackRock’s own staff have been cautious about what tokenization can do. Samara Cohen, one of BlackRock’s senior ETF executives, said that tokenizing an asset or wrapping it in an ETF “does not magically create volume and liquidity”, calling that idea “a mythology”. A market still needs demand and infrastructure.

Hedera: present at Sibos, but no money yet

Hedera’s grade was “in the room with the banks”. The network is governed by a council of large organizations, and it had a stand at Sibos, the SWIFT conference in Miami that ran from September 28 to October 1.

A representative of Shinhan Bank, one of South Korea’s largest banks, said Shinhan joined the Hedera council in 2021 and ran a proof of concept with Hedera for a stablecoin remittance project. The video’s caveat: a conference stand is not money going in.

XRP: the Batch upgrade slips to October 9

XRP had a real date this week, then lost it. Batch is an XRP Ledger upgrade, or “amendment”, that bundles up to eight transactions into one all-or-nothing package. The video compares it to paying at the till: you either pay and get your shopping, or neither happens. According to a speaker on Ripple’s channel, it was mainly written by Denis Angell of XRPL Labs.

To switch on, an amendment needs more than 80% of the ledger’s trusted validators, the computers that agree on what goes on the ledger, for two straight weeks. Batch was on track for September 29. Support dipped below 80% on September 25, the clock restarted, and the earliest it can now go live is October 9. CoinDesk quoted a RippleX engineering lead saying some projects are already being built with Batch in mind.

The one-word check on your own coins

The video ends with a free check any holder can do. Open whatever app your coins sit in and look at the word next to your balance.

1. If it is just a number, your coins are parked and doing nothing.
2. If it says “earning”, ask who holds the keys while it earns.

The video points to Celsius as the reason the second question matters. Celsius customers were earning on their coins until June 12, 2022, when Celsius paused every withdrawal, swap and transfer.

It then frames three decisions for anyone holding a meaningful position:

1. Who holds the keys to your coins: you or an exchange?
2. Are they doing anything while you wait on the October dates?
3. When the next Wall Street headline lands, do you already know your plan, or will you decide on the day based on the news?

What to watch next

Several dates from this week are still open. Watch whether Batch reaches 80% validator support and holds it through October 9, whether DTCC’s Canton launch goes live in October as stated, and which new portfolios Ondo adds over the coming months. As BlackRock’s own executive noted, a token going live is not the same as people trading it, so watch for real volume, not just announcements.