Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher
In the cyclical nature of the cryptocurrency market, Solana once regained its peak by leveraging the narrative of the "Ethereum killer" and extreme performance. However, as we enter 2026, this once high-speed "high-performance computer" is facing unprecedented pressure to decelerate, starting with its price.
Over the past year, SOL's price has fallen up to 73.5% from its high, the largest drop among all major cryptocurrencies. In the recent month's market correction, SOL's rally has also been very weak, significantly lagging behind BTC, ETH, and other major cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, Solana's core vision of "Internet Capital Markets" is suffering heavy blows from internal and external troubles. This has forced Solana Foundation's senior team to frequently speak out recently, promoting their ecosystem in the court of public opinion.
Solana's Core Narrative Falters
In recent years, Solana has been attempting to tell a story far grander than just a "high-performance public chain."
As defined by the Solana Foundation, Solana's endgame has shifted to becoming "Internet Capital Markets" – a global trading network for bringing 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映入眼帘 is still: "Capital markets for every asset on the planet."
This implies Solana aims not only to challenge Ethereum but also to replace traditional exchanges, brokerages, and clearing systems, becoming the on-chain Nasdaq. High speed, low fees, high throughput, a relatively mature user experience, and strong backing from Wall Street capital once made Solana seem the closest to achieving this goal.
The problem, however, is that when the "Internet Capital Markets" truly began to take shape, the market realized the core position might not necessarily belong to Solana.
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 is it 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 had 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 crucially, Hyperliquid has gradually proven something many previously overlooked: an "Internet Capital Markets" might not need a general-purpose ecosystem.
For high-frequency financial trading, the importance of performance, matching, liquidity, and trading experience far outweighs "richness of on-chain applications." This means a vertical Layer1 specifically designed for financial transactions might be more suitable to become the core of on-chain capital markets than a general-purpose public chain like Solana.
This is also why more and more capital, traders, and attention are converging towards Hyperliquid.
After the Drift Incident, Solana Forced to Adjust Its Perpetual Futures Market Strategy
If Hyperliquid is squeezing Solana's "capital markets" strategic space from the outside, then the attack on Drift Protocol tore a huge gap from the inside.
In early April 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 has long played a core liquidity role in Solana DeFi. After the hacker attack, 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. Facing the market vacuum left by Drift and Solana's strategic gap in the on-chain derivatives field, the Solana official must strongly promote a new alternative product to capture users and market share in this frontline battlefield of the "Internet Capital Markets" strategy.
At this point, the choices before Solana officials include Pacifica, Phoenix, Jupiter, GMTrade, Bullet, Blink, and a series of other products. However, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko firmly chose Phoenix.
In the past five days, Toly has posted at least twenty tweets or retweets related to Phoenix, either转发 other industry figures' testing experiences with Phoenix, directly recommending the use of Phoenix, or discussing views on Phoenix.
Regarding this level of "favoritism," Toly has also explained multiple times, stating that Pacifica does not execute trades on the Solana chain – its compatibility with Solana is as good as Hyperliquid's, and Jupiter is already mature. He is more focused on early-stage teams from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, Phoenix is decentralized and can be atomically composable with all other applications on Solana.
Driven by Toly, Phoenix's popularity ranked in the top three of RootData's trending projects list for consecutive days and reached a historical peak in its 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 was consistently less than $4 million before. Recently, riding the market hype, its daily volume surpassed $80 million for the first time. But it still ranks outside the top 20 among all perpetual futures platforms, with over 20 times the gap to the top 5 platforms (lowest $1.6 billion).
Solana's Media Offensive and Internal Cracks
Faced with Hyperliquid's强势崛起 and their own ecosystem's wounds, Solana supporters have chosen a seemingly "using your own spear to attack your shield" path – wielding decentralization as a weapon to launch a media attack against Hyperliquid.
Solana Foundation member @harkl_ tweeted that Hyperliquid's宣传语 is a decentralized exchange, but the reality is 24 validator nodes, closed-source node code, a single bridge承载着 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, it's not permissionless. No matter what you do, you cannot run a Hyperliquid sequencer," Toly further stated.
This argument sparked激烈讨论 within the crypto community. Supporters believe Toly hit Hyperliquid's core软肋 – if there are fewer than 30 validator nodes, node code is not公开, and the bridge is highly centralized, then what is the fundamental difference between the so-called "on-chain capital markets" and the托管模式 of CEXs?
Opponents point out that Solana's own validator count has锐减 from 2560 to about 756, with the Nakamoto coefficient dropping from 31 to 20. The top twenty validators control over one-third of the staked share. Against this backdrop, discussing "decentralization" somewhat resembles "the pot calling the kettle black."
A more棘手的问题 comes from within the Solana ecosystem. The unanimous "favoritism" from many Solana Foundation高层 has引起不满 among numerous other protocol developers.
"They will promote what they believe is most beneficial to them. Pushing others away just because one team meets certain criteria is turning friends into enemies," said kdotcrypto, co-founder of Bulk.
The comment from Pacifica founder Constance was more restrained but also more cutting: "We chose Solana in 2025, didn't receive any funding from the Foundation, didn't raise money from investors, just wanted to build the product first and let the market decide." Behind this phrase "let the market decide" lies a veiled protest against the Solana Foundation's role as both "referee and player."
The most残酷真相 of the crypto market is this: users don't care about grand narratives; they only care about depth, liquidity, and security. Hyperliquid's崛起 is not only a technical victory but also a dimensional打击 against the "general-purpose public chain" narrative – it proves that the core of building capital markets might not be a庞杂的生态, but an极致撮合引擎.
Now, Solana is陷入 the mire of competing with rivals over "decentralization metrics," while its favored Phoenix still has a 20倍 trading volume鸿沟 from 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 might remain an excellent Meme playground, but it will only move further away from the dream of "hosting global assets."
