Institutional Staking in Custody: The Vault Embeds P2P.org Validator Infrastructure

<p>Institutional capital on Solana has a visible layer and a working layer. The visible layer is the announcement flow: new treasury deployments, new stablecoin pilots, new settlement rails. The working layer is what practitioners inside regulated institutions deal with before any of that goes live, and those questions rarely surface in launch coverage.</p><p>On June 30, P2P.org hosted Institutional Capital on Solana: From Allocators to Whales, an institutional roundtable exploring how professional investors are evaluating the Solana ecosystem today.</p><p>Moderated by Liza Balandina, Solana Ecosystem Lead at P2P.org, the discussion featured Catherine Gu (Head of Product, Digital Assets, Solana Foundation), Thibault Dubuis (Head of Staking &amp; DeFi, Sygnum Bank), Aleksandar Bukovski (Research Lead, The Big Whale), and Ben Harvey (Digital Asset Researcher, Keyrock). Together, they explored institutional adoption, staking, data transparency, and what it will take to unlock the next wave of capital entering the network.</p><p>This recap highlights the four themes that emerged most consistently throughout the discussion: regulatory and compliance considerations, the need for reliable on-chain data, how institutions evaluate validators, and the emerging native staking vaults category sitting between native staking and DeFi.</p><p><strong>LEARNINGS FOR BUSY READERS</strong></p><ul><li>Compliance sign-off is what stalls institutional allocation to Solana. The technology itself has moved past the question.</li><li>The public chain vs regulated finance dichotomy is closing: JPMorgan, Visa, Mastercard, and Franklin Templeton are already live on Solana.</li><li>Data reliability is a compliance question. The same metric can differ by billions across providers, and the Solana Foundation's new aggregation layer is the first attempt to fix it.</li><li>Institutional validator evaluation comes down to reporting depth: reward attribution, key recovery, SOC 2.</li><li>A middle category is emerging where staked SOL is used as collateral while remaining delegated to the validator, giving institutions access to lending without holding a wrapped derivative.&nbsp;</li></ul><h2 id="compliance-surface-where-allocation-actually-stalls"><strong>Compliance surface: where allocation actually stalls</strong></h2><p>Aleksandar Bukovski opened with the answer most of the ecosystem prefers to avoid. Across the large banks in his research audience, compliance sign-off is the number one prohibitor of Solana allocation. The hesitation is rarely about the chain itself and rarely about volatility in isolation. It is about what a risk committee has to approve.</p><p>The friction shows up at the committee level. An analyst who wants to allocate has to walk the risk committee through what the exposure actually is, how it maps to the institution's existing custody policy, and what happens under stress. That work is heavy for any new asset. It gets heavier when the asset requires the institution to hold something its custody policy never anticipated.</p><p>Catherine Gu named the misconception sitting underneath this. Many institutions still assume that public-chain participation and regulated financial infrastructure exclude each other: that a public chain means the wild west, and that regulated work requires a permissioned setting where liquidity is sacrificed. On Solana, where JPMorgan, Visa, Mastercard, and Franklin Templeton are already running live products, the two coexist. The gap she identified is awareness. Institutions have not yet fully absorbed what the technology already delivers.</p><p>Thibault Dubuis reinforced the point from the field. Describing the discourse at institutional events such as Point Zero in Zurich, he noted that the conversation has moved from building proprietary chains to a more practical question:</p><blockquote><em>Very few people were saying we are going to build our own chain. Super senior people from very big financial institutions were now asking: how am I going to use this public chain?</em><br><br>Thibault Dubuis, Sygnum Bank</blockquote><h2 id="the-data-question-what-allocators-need-before-trusting-on-chain-metrics"><strong>The data question: what allocators need before trusting on-chain metrics</strong></h2><p>The data thread produced the sharpest exchange of the panel. Catherine described what surprised her when the Foundation's data work began: the same metric, calculated by different providers, can differ by billions of dollars. For an allocator building a portfolio thesis, that discrepancy is fatal.</p><p>The Foundation's response is the recently launched aggregation layer at solana.com/data, which benchmarks eight to nine data providers side by side across stablecoin supply, DEX volume, fees, active addresses, and transactions. Catherine positioned the effort as neutral infrastructure. The Foundation does not want to set the standard. It wants to give data providers a coordinated venue to reconcile with one another:</p><blockquote><em>The truth is out there. I do not think it is a single provider who should be setting the standard. We want to be neutral and include all the top players collecting data right now, so it gives them a chance to coordinate and reconcile between one another.</em><br><br>Catherine Gu, Solana Foundation</blockquote><p>Aleksandar pushed for a further step. His reference frame came from traditional finance: the big four auditor structure, and the distinction between a 10-K and a 10-Q. The audited annual filing carries a different weight of trust than the quarterly self-report. In his view, Solana's data layer needs a similar independent-auditor structure, so a risk committee can underwrite the numbers rather than trust a single provider.</p><p>Thibault illustrated how a regulated institution handles the problem today. Sygnum runs full nodes, performs its own indexing every two epochs, and cross-checks every reward calculation against a third-party shadow instance. The reason is regulatory rather than technical: reward bookings in a core banking system must be defensible under audit. The Swiss tax authority treats MEV rewards as VAT-taxable service revenue, while consensus rewards receive different treatment. Which means validator reporting has to distinguish the two at a granularity a bank's operations department can defend to a regulator.</p><h2 id="what-institutional-grade-validator-infrastructure-looks-like-in-practice"><strong>What institutional-grade validator infrastructure looks like in practice</strong></h2><p>Asked what Sygnum actually evaluates when selecting a validator, Thibault's answer was, in his own framing, less technical than the industry usually expects.</p><p>The list: withdrawal-key configuration and the fund-recovery process, SOC 2 credentials and operational certifications, track record on chain, whether the operator can run test-network operations for pre-flight validation, and the granularity of downstream reporting. The emphasis sits on that last point. If a validator cannot cleanly report which portion of rewards came from consensus and which came from MEV, the client bank cannot cleanly book those rewards for tax and audit purposes. If the reporting is not clean, the operator does not clear evaluation.</p><p>OFAC-compliance capability also came up, less as a current requirement than as optionality the institution wants to know exists in case regulators require it later.</p><p>The picture Thibault drew is that institutional-grade, inside a treasury risk committee, means operational depth behind the reporting rather than peak performance numbers. This maps to how P2P.org approaches its own validator profile on Solana: non-custodial architecture across 40+ networks, SOC 2 controls, an explicit regulatory posture, and a dedicated test environment where new client builds, MEV behavior, and edge cases run before reaching a delegated mainnet position.</p><h2 id="the-vault-middle-category-between-native-staking-and-defi"><strong>The vault middle category between native staking and DeFi</strong></h2><p>The most concrete design question of the panel came in the DeFi section. Liza framed it directly: native staking is the safest way to optimize an institutional portfolio, DeFi is where the compliance friction lives, and a middle category has emerged where native stake is used as collateral without a full DeFi posture. The question was whether this is a structural bridge or a relabeling.</p><blockquote><em>If you are looking at it in terms of underwriting, it is definitely just relabeling the same risk. You have to underwrite the same risk, but it is packaged in a way that makes it slightly more attractive for different players. </em><br><br>Ben Harvey, Keyrock</blockquote><p>Aleksandar added the compliance side of the same picture. Institutional compliance teams find LSTs particularly hard to underwrite because the wrapper introduces a systemic layer on top of the underlying stake. His example was blunt: what happens if the issuer goes down? Native protocol rewards are already something risk committees are learning to model. A wrapped derivative multiplies the questions.</p><p>From P2P.org's perspective, the key distinction lies in what happens to the underlying staking position. In an LST-mediated setup, the treasury holds a wrapped derivative on its balance sheet. In a native staking vault design, the treasury continues to hold natively delegated SOL while the position is represented within the lending protocol through a protocol-specific token rather than a treasury-held wrapper.</p><p>While the overall economic risk is not necessarily reduced, the underwriting requirements change. LST-mediated positions require institutions to assess the wrapper, its issuer, governance model, and custody treatment alongside the underlying stake. Native staking vaults simplify that diligence by focusing on the underlying delegated position and the lending protocol itself. Whether this becomes the preferred institutional model will ultimately depend on how these designs evolve and how regulators and risk committees assess them.</p><h2 id="what-is-ahead"><strong>What is ahead</strong></h2><p>Catherine's read on the next 12 months centered on tokenization and stablecoins as two sides of the same coin. Solana already leads on stablecoin volume and liquidity by most metrics, and the natural sequencing brings more real-world asset issuance onto that liquidity base. Confidential transfers via the Token 22 program relaunched on mainnet in late June, giving stablecoin issuers a live privacy feature on regulated tokens, with further privacy solutions approaching mainnet.</p><p>Thibault's push was toward genuine on-chain issuance rather than tokenization of off-chain instruments:</p><blockquote><em>This stuff needs to be issued directly on chain, and this needs to be the source of truth. Until a judge says that if it did not happen on chain, it did not happen, a lot of the stuff we build on these blockchains is a bit pointless.</em><br><br>Thibault Dubuis, Sygnum Bank</blockquote><p>The closing round produced three takes worth keeping. Ben argued that ETFs, counterintuitively, have functioned as a partial blocker for on-chain capital: investment committees can point to the ETF allocation, claim the asset class is covered, and remove the internal pressure to push further on chain. Aleksandar's take was on layer one fragmentation:</p><blockquote><em>The layer one ecosystem right now is too fragmented. The industry is not big enough for 10,000 layer ones. Great consolidation needs to happen, and that fragmentation is sucking out liquidity and redirecting capital from the clear and obvious winners. </em><br><br>Aleksandar Bukovski, The Big Whale</blockquote><p>Thibault closed on market depth: much of the announcement flow is still marketing theater, and until DeFi pools on Solana can absorb an institutional-size liquidation without moving the whole market, institutional size remains an aspiration.</p><p><strong>KEY TAKEAWAY</strong></p><p>The institutional capital thesis on Solana is resolving at the infrastructure layer and stalling at the compliance layer. The bottleneck is the operational surface a risk committee has to sign off on for each new position. </p><p>Throughout the discussion, the panel highlighted how institutions are addressing these challenges in practice, including demonstrating asset segregation and liquidity to regulators, validating reward calculations through independent verification, distinguishing MEV from consensus rewards for accounting and tax purposes, and assessing vault-based staking products without introducing unnecessary layers of complexity.</p><p>Ultimately, the design distinctions that resolve these operational questions - reward attribution, position structure, audit trail - are what will determine which institutional segments deploy on Solana next.</p><p><strong>Disclaimer:</strong> The views and opinions shared during this discussion are those of the individual speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of P2P.org. This recap is intended to summarize the key themes discussed and should not be considered investment, legal, or financial advice.</p><p><strong>FAQ</strong></p><p><strong>What did the P2P.org Institutional Capital on Solana webinar cover?</strong></p><p>The June 30 panel featured practitioners from Solana Foundation, Sygnum Bank, Keyrock, and The Big Whale, covering compliance friction on institutional allocation, data reliability as a compliance question, validator evaluation criteria, and the vault category between native staking and DeFi.</p><p><strong>What is the main compliance friction blocking institutional DeFi participation on Solana?</strong></p><p>Two overlapping constraints. Institutional treasuries need to prove to regulators that assets are segregated and available at all times, which conflicts with lending pools that can reach full utilization. And LST wrappers introduce additional diligence categories, including issuer risk and accounting classification, that compound across positions.</p><p><strong>How do institutions evaluate validator infrastructure on Solana?</strong></p><p>Sygnum's framework weighs withdrawal-key recovery, SOC 2 credentials, on-chain track record, testnet operations, and the granularity of reward reporting. Reporting carries the most weight because banks must distinguish consensus rewards from MEV rewards for tax and audit purposes.</p><p><strong>What is the difference between native staking, LSTs, and native staking vaults on Solana?</strong></p><p>Native staking delegates SOL to a validator, with protocol rewards accruing directly to the delegation. LSTs wrap the staked position into a derivative the treasury holds on its books, adding wrapper-related diligence. Native staking vaults keep the position delegated to the validator and represent it inside a lending protocol through a protocol-scoped token, without a treasury-held wrapper.</p><p><strong>Where can I watch the webinar replay?</strong></p><p>The full replay of Institutional Capital on Solana: From Allocators to Whales is available on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3izfwGyn2Ak&t=672s&ref=p2p.org" rel="noreferrer">Youtube</a> alongside this written recap.</p><p><strong>WORK WITH P2P.ORG ON SOLANA</strong></p><p>If your institution is evaluating what participation on Solana looks like in practice, the P2P.org team is available for that conversation. We work with institutional allocators across custody profiles. We can walk through the specific operational questions your treasury or risk committee is navigating, from validator evaluation criteria to reward reporting granularity. Explore P2P.org Solana staking infrastructure at p2p.org or reach the team on Telegram at @P2P_staking_support_bot</p>