In an interview with CoinDesk, Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante stated that the Solana ecosystem has focused more on a pragmatic area over the past year: financial infrastructure. Ferrante indicated he will be speaking at CoinDesk's Consensus conference in Hong Kong next month. "The network is increasingly being built around high-throughput on-chain transactions, market structures, and settlements—what people call the internet capital markets," Ferrante said. He added that while cryptocurrency prices remain sluggish and native cryptocurrency investors remain cautious, institutional investor interest in cryptocurrencies is high. The long-term prospects for Solana, and indeed the entire blockchain, depend on its role as a neutral settlement layer. In the future, assets such as stocks and derivatives will flow seamlessly between platforms in the form of standardized tokens, rather than being stored in isolated databases. As global finance moves more onto-chain, Solana will ultimately reap the rewards. (CoinDesk)