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Michael Saylor Bets on Solana to Power the Future of Programmable Digital Credit

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Nexo Partners with Bakkt for US Crypto Exchange and Yield Programs

TLDR:

  • Michael Saylor named Solana as the primary blockchain for deploying programmable digital credit at scale.
  • Strategy’s STRF converts Bitcoin’s economic energy into structured cash flows with principal protection for investors.
  • Saylor introduced BTC rating, BTC risk, and credit spread as core metrics for measuring digital credit risk.
  • A reflexive flywheel effect ties credit creation to Bitcoin demand, driving equity value across the broader ecosystem.

Michael Saylor has made a bold claim about the future of programmable digital credit. The Strategy executive chairman recently stated that Solana will serve as the primary blockchain for deploying this next generation of digital credit instruments.

His remarks came alongside a detailed breakdown of Strategy’s STRF product and a broader framework for Bitcoin-backed credit.

The statement drew attention from across the crypto industry given Saylor’s long-standing association with Bitcoin maximalism.

Saylor Points to Solana as the Infrastructure for Digital Credit Deployment

Saylor’s choice of Solana as the deployment platform surprised many observers in the crypto space. He cited the blockchain’s speed, accessibility, and scalability as key reasons for the selection.

According to Saylor, programmable digital credit requires infrastructure that can handle tokenized instruments operating at scale. Solana, in his view, meets those technical requirements more effectively than other available options.

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His vision extends beyond a single product. Saylor outlined how digital credit can be embedded into ETFs, tokens, bank accounts, and layer 3 blockchain solutions.

Each of these serves as a building block for creating digital yield and accessible digital money. Together, they form an interconnected system designed to move value across digital rails efficiently.

The programmable nature of this credit is central to Saylor’s argument. By encoding credit terms directly into blockchain infrastructure, issuers can automate dividend payments, collateral checks, and risk adjustments.

This removes the friction associated with traditional credit instruments and opens access to a much wider investor base. Solana’s architecture makes this level of programmability practical at a global scale.

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Saylor also described a reflexive flywheel effect that programmable digital credit can trigger. Credit creation drives Bitcoin demand, which raises Bitcoin’s price and increases equity value.

That, in turn, strengthens the entire ecosystem and encourages further credit issuance. Deploying this mechanism on Solana, he argued, amplifies its reach and speed considerably.

Strategy’s STRF Lays the Foundation for Bitcoin-Backed Credit on Chain

STRF sits at the core of Saylor’s digital credit framework. Strategy converts Bitcoin’s economic energy into structured cash flows by stripping away risk, dampening volatility, and extracting yield.

The result is a variable preferred security that offers both principal protection and higher returns than traditional credit. Investors also benefit from return-of-capital tax treatment, which reduces their overall tax liability directly.

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Saylor introduced three metrics for evaluating digital credit risk: BTC rating, BTC risk, and credit spread. These tools give investors a clear and measurable way to assess collateral coverage and under-collateralization probability.

Excess Bitcoin volatility is transferred to MSTR common equity holders rather than to credit investors. This structure protects STRF holders during market downturns.

STRF’s track record supports Saylor’s framework. The product maintained its value and continued paying dividends through significant Bitcoin price drawdowns.

That stability makes it competitive with traditional credit instruments that are often tax-inefficient and difficult to access. STRF, by contrast, is designed to be widely accessible and straightforward to hold.

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Corporate treasuries represent a major target market for this product. Saylor argued that companies allocating a portion of holdings to STRF could potentially double their cash flow.

With Solana as the deployment layer, that access becomes even broader and more seamless for institutional and retail participants alike.

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Crypto World

Ethereum Roadmap Targets 2-Second Blocks and Quantum Safety

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Ethereum Roadmap Targets 2-Second Blocks and Quantum Safety

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has added to a newly released roadmap outlining how Ethereum plans to dramatically speed up the production of new blocks and the confirmation of transactions.

Vitalik’s comments on Thursday offered more detail on a visual public roadmap called “Strawmap” released by the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team. 

“Fast slots are off in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and do not really seem to connect to anything,” said Buterin, noting that the rest of the roadmap is “pretty independent of the slot time.” 

Slot time is the time it takes for Ethereum to produce new blocks, currently around 12 seconds. The roadmap aims to get this down to as fast as 2 seconds, so the blockchain feels more like a live, responsive system rather than something that has to be waited for.

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“I expect that we’ll reduce slot time in an incremental fashion,” said Buterin, suggesting reductions following a roughly square-root-of-two formula from 12 seconds down through 8, 6, 4, and eventually as low as 2 seconds.

He also suggested that p2p improvements, or upgrades to how Ethereum nodes communicate with each other — such as sharing new blocks and data without the need to download repeated data — can greatly reduce block propagation time, “making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs.” 

Ethereum Strawmap depicts a four-year roadmap. Source: Ethereum Foundation 

Finality from minutes to seconds 

The second major improvement in the roadmap is to finality, or the point at which a transaction is mathematically guaranteed to be irreversible, which is currently around 16 minutes. 

The future goal is finality between 6 and 16 seconds, achieved by replacing the current complicated confirmation system with a cleaner, simpler one that’s also quantum-resistant.

Related: Ethereum Foundation lists ‘quantum readiness,’ gas limits as 2026 priorities

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“The goal is to decouple slots and finality, to allow us to reason about both separately,” explained Buterin. 

He said this was a “very invasive set of changes,” so the plan is to bundle the largest step in each change with a “switch of the cryptography, notably to post-quantum hash-based signatures.”

Quantum resistance of slots before finality

Buterin said that a consequence of this approach would be quantum-resistant slots before finality. 

“One interesting consequence of the incremental approach is that there is a pathway to making the slots quantum-resistant much sooner than making the finality quantum-resistant.” 

The network might “quite quickly” get to a regime where, if quantum computers suddenly appear, “we lose the finality guarantee, but the chain keeps chugging along,” he said. 

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“Expect to see progressive decreases of both slot time and finality time,” Buterin summarized.

The “component-by-component replacement” of Ethereum’s slot structure and consensus will produce a “cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, prover-friendly, end-to-end formally-verified alternative.”

The timescale for these changes is over the next four years, with seven forks planned roughly every six months. Glamsterdam and Hegotá are already confirmed and slated for later this year. 

Magazine: Bitcoin may take 7 years to upgrade to post-quantum: BIP-360 co-author

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