Wall Street spent a decade and billions of dollars building private blockchains. Then it figured out they were just slow databases. JPMorgan built one. So did dozens of others. The logic seemed sound: public networks are too risky, too open. We need our own.

That story is over. JPMorgan put its digital dollar on Base. BlackRock went straight to Ethereum. And last week, Citi — the bank that moves money across 160 countries — took a centuries-old paper document and ran the entire thing on Solana [RELEASE]

Here’s what happened and why it changes the math for a $9.7 trillion market.

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What happened

On February 13, 2026, Citi Group completed a proof of concept (PoC)1 tokenizing a bill of exchange2 on the Solana blockchain through its Trade and Working Capital Solutions division, working with PwC and the Solana Foundation. This kind of paper takes days to process and requires people to manually verify, approve, and settle, and ran the entire thing automatically.

The pilot simulated the full lifecycle of the instrument using synthetic data: issuance, financing, distribution, and settlement. By converting the bill into a digital token, the bank embedded payment amounts, counterparties, and maturity dates directly into the asset’s code. [FULL REPORT]

The result: a process that traditionally takes days compressed to minutes. Ownership transferred automatically with the token. Repayment at maturity went to the current holder without manual tracking. Everything that required courier services, physical signatures, and multi-bank reconciliation became autonomous code on a public blockchain processing 1,000-3,000+ transactions per second.