The Solana Research Institute Sessions

Financial institutions assessing a public blockchain usually start from the outsourcing model: a single provider, a contract, an SLA and someone to hold accountable. A permissionless network offers none of those, so how should an operational risk team assess it?

Angus Scott, Managing Editor of the Solana Research Institute, puts that question to Jacob Creech, who leads the technology side of the Solana Foundation. They discuss Solana’s early outages and how fixes are coordinated across independent validators. They also cover how the Alpenglow consensus upgrade was tested on a community cluster before going live, and who made the final go/no-go decision. The second half works through scenarios a bank would document as severe but plausible: network degradation, a full outage, undersea cable cuts and a jurisdiction banning validators. Jacob explains why banks should reconcile against finalised rather than processed transactions, and why some institutions run their own nodes.

The episode closes on whether the protocol’s own rules can stand in for the SLA a procurement team would normally negotiate.

On 18 June 2026, the Solana Research Institute convened an invitation-only roundtable in London on what it takes to build digital assets into core treasury operations. Stablecoins against existing rails and where tokenised deposits fit instead, the tiered custody stack, resilience planning under regulatory scrutiny, and why the internal change problem is often harder than the technical one.