Author: Hu Tao
In the cyclical waves of the cryptocurrency market, Solana once returned to its peak with the "Ethereum killer" narrative and extreme performance. However, as we enter 2026, this once high-performance machine is facing unprecedented deceleration pressure, first evident in its price.
In the past year, SOL's price has fallen by up to 73.5% from its high, the largest decline among all mainstream cryptocurrencies. In the recent month's market pullback, SOL's gains have also been very weak, significantly lagging behind other major cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH.
Furthermore, Solana's core vision of "Internet Capital Markets" has suffered a major blow amidst internal and external challenges, forcing the Solana Foundation's senior team to speak out frequently recently, promoting their ecosystem on the public opinion front.
Solana's Core Narrative Hits a Wall
Over the past few years, Solana has been trying to tell a story far grander than just a "high-performance public chain."
In the definition of the Solana Foundation, Solana's endgame has transformed into "Internet Capital Markets"—a global trading network that brings stocks, commodities, futures, perpetual contracts, and all real-world assets on-chain.
Now, upon opening the official Solana website homepage, the most prominent slogan immediately greeting you is still: "Capital markets for every asset on Earth."
This means Solana aims not only to challenge Ethereum but also to replace traditional exchanges, brokers, and clearing systems, becoming the on-chain version of Nasdaq. High speed, low fees, high throughput, relatively mature user experience, and the strong backing of Wall Street capital once positioned Solana as the public chain closest to achieving this goal.
However, the problem is that as the "Internet Capital Markets" truly begin to take shape, the market is finding that Solana may not necessarily be at its core.
The Unexpected Impact of Hyperliquid
One of the biggest structural changes in the crypto industry over the past year has been the migration of the perpetual futures market away from traditional CEXs to on-chain platforms.
The biggest beneficiary of this trend is not Solana, nor Ethereum, Sui, or other networks, but Hyperliquid.
Initially, Hyperliquid was just an on-chain perpetual futures trading platform, but with the advancement of its Layer1 strategy, it has gradually evolved into a complete financial infrastructure network. Compared to Solana's broad and abstract "capital markets" vision, Hyperliquid has chosen a more focused, transaction-driven path.
For a long time, although the Solana ecosystem has hosted numerous DeFi projects, its core liquidity has always leaned more towards spot trading, Meme Coins, and on-chain speculation. The infrastructure truly capable of supporting institutional-grade trading depth, risk management, and high-frequency trading needs has never matured.
More critically, Hyperliquid has gradually proven something many previously overlooked: an "Internet Capital Markets" may not necessarily require a general-purpose ecosystem.
For high-frequency financial transactions, performance, matching, liquidity, and trading experience are far more important than "richness of on-chain applications." This means a vertical Layer1 specifically designed for financial transactions might be more suitable as the core of on-chain capital markets than a general-purpose public chain like Solana.
This is also why an increasing amount of capital, traders, and attention is converging on Hyperliquid.
After the Drift Incident, Solana Forced to Adjust Perpetual Futures Market Strategy
If Hyperliquid's rise externally squeezes the strategic space for Solana's "capital markets," then the Drift Protocol exploit incident tore open a massive gap from within.
In early April of this year, the Solana DeFi protocol Drift suffered a governance and oracle attack, resulting in over $200 million in losses.
As one of the most important perpetual futures protocols on Solana, Drift had been playing a central liquidity role in Solana DeFi. After the hack, the protocol's functions were directly paralyzed, a large number of assets, vaults, and associated protocols within the Solana ecosystem were affected, and market confidence rapidly deteriorated.
Perpetual futures are a fiercely contested territory in the DeFi space. Faced with the market vacuum left by Drift and the strategic gap in Solana's on-chain derivatives field, the Solana official team must vigorously promote a new alternative product to capture users and market share in this frontline battle for the "Internet Capital Markets" strategy.
At this point, the choices before Solana officials included a series of products like Pacifica, Phoenix, Jupiter, GMTrade, Bullet, and Blink. However, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko firmly chose Phoenix.
Over the past five days, Toly has posted at least twenty tweets or retweets related to Phoenix, either forwarding other industry figures' test experiences with Phoenix, directly recommending its use, or discussing his views on Phoenix.
Regarding such "favoritism," Toly has also explained multiple times that Pacifica does not execute trades on the Solana chain; its compatibility with Solana is as good as Hyperliquid's, while Jup is already mature, and he is more focused on early-stage teams building from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, Phoenix is decentralized and can be atomically composable with all other applications on Solana.
Driven by Toly's promotion, Phoenix's popularity has ranked among the top three on RootData's trending projects list for consecutive days, reaching its historical peak in the heat index.
However, in terms of trading volume, Phoenix still lags far behind other established perpetual futures platforms. According to DeFillama data, Phoenix's daily trading volume had long been less than $4 million, and recently, riding the market hype, it surpassed $80 million for the first time. Yet, it still ranks outside the top 20 among all perpetual platforms, with at least a 20-fold gap from the top 5 platforms (minimum $1.6 billion).
Solana's Public Relations Offensive and Internal Rifts
Faced with Hyperliquid's strong rise and the wounds within its own ecosystem, Solana supporters have chosen a seemingly "using the opponent's own spear as a shield" path—wielding decentralization as a weapon to launch a public opinion attack against Hyperliquid.
Solana Foundation member @harkl_ tweeted that Hyperliquid markets itself as a decentralized exchange, but the reality is 24 validator nodes, closed-source node code, a single bridge handling tens of billions of dollars, and a record of forced settlements during market volatility.
"Can you participate in any part of the protocol stack with your own resources without approval from a trusted third party? If not, then it's not permissionless. No matter what you do, you cannot run a Hyperliquid sequencer," Toly further stated.
This argument sparked heated debate in the crypto community. Supporters believe Toly hit Hyperliquid's core weakness—if there are fewer than 30 validator nodes, node code is not open-source, and the bridge is highly centralized, what is the fundamental difference between this so-called "on-chain capital market" and the custodial model of CEXs?
Opponents point out that Solana's own validator count has sharply dropped from 2560 to about 756, its Nakamoto Coefficient has fallen from 31 to 20, and the top twenty validators control over one-third of the staked share—in this context, discussing "decentralization" seems somewhat like "the pot calling the kettle black."
An even thornier issue comes from within the Solana ecosystem. The consistent "favoritism" shown by many Solana Foundation executives has caused discontent among developers of other protocols.
"They will promote what they think is best for themselves. Pushing others away just because a team meets a certain criterion is turning friends into enemies," said kdotcrypto, co-founder of Bulk.
The comment from Pacifica founder Constance was more restrained yet equally damaging: "We chose Solana in 2025, didn't take any funding from the Foundation, didn't raise from investors, just wanted to build the product first and let the market decide." This phrase "let the market decide" carries a veiled protest against the Solana Foundation's role as both "referee and player."
The most brutal truth of the crypto market is this: users don't care about grand narratives; they only care about depth, liquidity, and safety. Hyperliquid's rise is not just a technical victory but a dimensional strike against the "general-purpose public chain" narrative—it proves that the core of building capital markets may not be a sprawling ecosystem, but an ultimate matching engine.
Now, Solana is mired in a quagmire of competing with rivals over "decentralization metrics," and its championed Phoenix still faces a 20-fold trading volume chasm compared to mainstream derivatives platforms.
In this battle for the endgame of "Internet Capital Markets," if Solana cannot regain its dominance in the derivatives field in the second half of 2026, it may remain an excellent Meme playground, but its dream of "hosting global assets" will only drift further away.
