Alchemy today announced a major overhaul of its Solana stack. With U.S. Solana ETFs already seeing US$280 million of inflows in their first six trading days — and analysts forecasting up to US$5 billion in flows over the next 12 months — the demand for enterprise-grade throughput and ultra-low latency is clear.

ETF flows meet infrastructure bottlenecks

The rush of ETFs tied to Solana isn’t just about price action; it’s creating a new class of stress for the network and its tooling. With institutions and payments rails expected to land on Solana — for instance Western Union’s upcoming stablecoin rollout — the chain now must deliver not just DeFi speed, but consumer-grade performance, reliability and scale. This puts pressure on RPC (remote procedure call) endpoints, streaming APIs, historical data access and archival layers.

According to Alchemy, its engineering team spent the last year “re-architecting our Solana offering,” following two years of collaborating with Solana builders to map their largest pain points. The result: a commercial release of new RPC and streaming API endpoints for Solana that claim dramatic performance and reliability gains — and crucially, no code changes required for existing integrations.

What’s new, in plain terms

Here’s a summary of Alchemy’s upgrades:

  • Archive calls (historical transaction and block queries) now up to 20× faster, with no proprietary wrapper or extra code required.
  • “Heavy” methods (e.g., getTransaction, getTokenAccountsByOwner) up to 2× faster.
  • Ultra-fast gRPC streaming, at less than half the price of other providers.
  • Platform-wide 99.95% uptime target and 2×+ throughput gains.
  • Several new features previously unavailable: gasless transactions, address activity webhooks, large responses (e.g., up to 1,000 accounts for getTokenLargestAccounts rather than 20), recency-first archive queries, and more.

Notably, Alchemy emphasises that these improvements are available today. Builders already using Alchemy for Solana simply continue as before — while new entrants can jump in via a fresh account.

Why it matters for Solana’s next phase

Solana’s architecture — including its Sealevel parallel smart-contract runtime — was built for high throughput. But the tooling layer that sits on top (RPCs, archives, indexing, streaming) has often lagged in handling enterprise-grade use-cases. Alchemy writes that many Solana teams “spent months rebuilding backfills, throttling requests or piecing together missing transactions just to get reliable datasets.”

With ETF flows, consumer payments and wallet-heavy applications coming fast, these bottlenecks become meaningful: slow data, missing history, downtime — they all degrade user experience, shrink conversion, and raise risk. Alchemy’s upgrade is geared for the moment when Solana moves from niche DeFi to mainstream consumer and institutional flows.

A strategic bet by Alchemy

This step also underscores Alchemy’s wider strategic pivot: known to many as “the AWS of Web3”, the firm originally built deep roots in the Ethereum ecosystem. Its move into Solana has accelerated: earlier this year it announced support for Solana via its developer platform.

In May 2025 Alchemy acquired DexterLab, a Solana-specialist infrastructure provider focused on raw data, archival queries and streaming for Solana and SVM-compatible sidechains. That acquisition signalled Alchemy’s readiness to treat Solana not just as another chain, but one demanding purpose-built infrastructure.

In this light, the newly announced upgrades can be viewed as the architectural payoff from that investment: multiregion HBase replacement for traditional Bigtable stacks, global distribution for archival data, recency-first queries, extended replay slots (up to 6,000 blocks) for streaming — all targeted at high-volume, low-latency demands.

Key implications and what to watch

  • For developers and wallets: If the claims hold, building on Solana via Alchemy just became more enterprise-friendly. Better performance for heavy queries means smoother UX for analytics dashboards, wallet activity feeds and complex apps.
  • For institutional users and ETFs: As Solana ETFs scale, the infrastructure under the hood matters. Downtime or unreliable data access could undermine institutional confidence. The 99.95% uptime target is a good signal, but real-world performance will matter.
  • For payments and consumer rails: With Western Union eyeing a Solana-based stablecoin next year, consumer-grade latency and reliability are non-negotiable. The upgrades seem aligned with that transition from DeFi use-cases to mass-market flows.
  • For Solana’s ecosystem momentum: Snap improvements in tooling often precede monetisation. As Solana moves further into mainstream finance, infrastructure propositions like Alchemy’s could accelerate ecosystem growth, drive builders, and reduce risk for projects requiring enterprise-grade uptime.
  • For other chains and infra providers: Alchemy’s explicit language around no code changes and no lock-in is worth attention. If Solana infrastructure becomes easier and more reliable, it shifts competitive dynamics among RPC/infra vendors and potentially influences migration decisions for projects supporting multiple blockchains.

With new Solana ETF flows, stablecoin launches and broader institutional interest converging, the timing of Alchemy’s Solana stack upgrade is notable. The company is positioning itself as the infra partner of choice for the next chapter of Solana — one in which the chain is not only a playground for high-speed DeFi, but foundational to payments, wallets, consumer rails and institutional assets.

For the thousands of builders already on Solana, the message is: the infra bottlenecks are being addressed. For institutions and wallets eyeing full-fledged production deployments, the question now becomes: do the numbers hold up in real-world conditions? And can Solana, backed by robust infrastructure like Alchemy’s, deliver the performance, reliability and scale they need?

In many ways, the era of “chewing glass” for Solana builders — as one industry maxim joked about the hard work of building on a moving target — may be receding. But the stakes are now higher. The infra must not just work, it must excel under live, global load.

Read Also: OpenAI’s $38B Cloud Deal with Amazon Marks a New AI Infrastructure Era

Disclaimer: The information provided on AlexaBlockchain is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Read complete disclaimer here.