Can DeFi Ever Compete With Wall Street?
The conventional wisdom says blockchains can’t keep up with Wall Street’s high-frequency machines involving microsecond trades, co-location and ultra-low latency networks. That’s true, and getting into that arms race is likely to be a losing battle. But “never match” doesn’t equal “never compete.” What’s changing right now is that DeFi is getting close enough in throughput and institutional trust.
High-frequency trading and traditional finance will probably always hold an edge when it comes to shaving off a few nanoseconds. But increasingly, institutions are asking whether a system settles reliably, if an execution be trusted and whether trading, tokenization, and treasury operations can be done transparently, with auditability and regulatory safety?
Recent developments suggest DeFi is starting to answer yes.
The throughput breakthroughs
With over $600M invested by firms like Upexi and DeFi Developments Corp since 2025 in Solana infrastructure, it makes the case for Wall Street-like experience being closer than it’s even been. This is particularly true for its network upgrades with clients like Firedancer, blockspace improvements and RPS enhancements. These upgrades are giving milliseconds of finality with high throughput and dramatically lowered costs. For many institutional use cases, tokenized stocks, corporate treasuries, stablecoin operations and portfolio rebalancing, this is “fast enough.”
But that’s no longer a solo story. EVM-based chains, long criticized for sluggishness, are evolving fast. Layer 2s on Ethereum, parallelized execution on Monad, and modular rollup frameworks are showing …
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