Author: Hu Tao
In the cyclical shifts of the cryptocurrency market, Solana once returned to its peak with the narrative of an 'Ethereum killer' and extreme performance. However, as of 2026, this once high-performance 'computer' running at full throttle is facing unprecedented pressure to slow down, first reflected in its price.
Over the past year, the maximum price drop of SOL from its high point reached 73.5%, the largest decline among all mainstream cryptocurrencies. In the recent month of market correction, SOL's rally has also been notably weak, significantly underperforming other mainstream cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH.
Furthermore, Solana's core 'Internet Capital Markets' vision has suffered a heavy blow amidst internal and external troubles, forcing the Solana Foundation's senior team to frequently speak out recently, creating momentum for its ecosystem in the court of public opinion.
Solana's Core Narrative Suffers Setbacks
Over the past few years, Solana has consistently attempted 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 even all real-world assets on-chain.
If you open the Solana official homepage today, the most prominent slogan that immediately catches your eye is still: 'Capital markets for every asset on Earth.'
It means that Solana not only aims to challenge Ethereum but also attempts 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 endorsement of Wall Street capital once positioned Solana as the public chain closest to achieving this goal.
The problem, however, is that when the 'Internet Capital Markets' truly began to take shape, the market discovered that Solana might not necessarily occupy the core position.
The Unexpected Impact of Hyperliquid
One of the biggest structural changes in the crypto industry over the past year is the migration of the perpetual contracts market away from traditional CEXs to on-chain platforms.
And 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 contracts trading platform. However, 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. Infrastructure truly capable of supporting institutional-grade trading depth, risk management, and high-frequency trading needs has never been mature.
More critically, Hyperliquid has gradually proven something many previously overlooked: the 'Internet Capital Markets' might not necessarily require 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 implies that a vertical Layer1 specifically designed for financial trading 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 are converging towards Hyperliquid.
After the Drift Incident, Solana Forced to Adjust Its Perpetual Contracts Market Strategy
If Hyperliquid is squeezing Solana's 'capital markets' strategic space from the outside, then the attack on Drift Protocol tore open a significant gap from within.
In early April this year, the Solana DeFi protocol Drift suffered a governance and oracle attack, resulting in losses exceeding $200 million.
As one of the most important perpetual contracts protocols on Solana, Drift had always 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 contracts are a fiercely contested territory in the DeFi field. Facing the market vacuum left by Drift and Solana's strategic gap in on-chain derivatives, the Solana team had to heavily promote new alternatives to capture users and market share in the front lines of the 'Internet Capital Markets' strategy.
At this point, the choices before the Solana team 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 (Anatoly) has posted at least twenty tweets or retweets related to Phoenix, either sharing other industry professionals' testing experiences with Phoenix, directly recommending its use, or discussing his views on Phoenix.
Regarding this '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—and that Jupiter is already mature, so he is focusing more on early-stage teams from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, Phoenix is decentralized and can atomically combine with all other applications on Solana.
Driven by Toly, Phoenix's popularity has remained in the top three of RootData's trending projects list for several consecutive days, reaching a historical peak in its heat index.
However, in terms of trading volume, Phoenix still lags far behind other established perpetual contracts platforms. According to DeFillama data, Phoenix's daily trading volume previously remained under $4 million for a long time. Recently, riding the market hype, its daily trading volume surpassed $80 million for the first time, but it still ranks outside the top 20 among all perpetual contracts platforms, with a gap of more than 20 times compared to platforms in the top 5 (minimum $1.6 billion).
Solana's Public Opinion Offensive and Internal Rifts
Faced with Hyperliquid's strong rise and the trauma within its own ecosystem, Solana supporters have chosen a seemingly 'using their own spear against their own shield' path—using decentralization as a weapon to launch a public opinion attack on Hyperliquid.
Solana Foundation member @harkl_ tweeted that Hyperliquid markets itself as a decentralized exchange platform, but the reality is 24 validator nodes, closed-source node code, a single bridge handling tens of billions of dollars in funds, 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 intense debate in the crypto community. Supporters believe Toly hit Hyperliquid's core weakness—if there are less than 30 validator nodes, the node code is not public, and the bridge is highly centralized, then what is the essential difference between the so-called 'on-chain capital market' and the custodial model of a CEX?
Opponents pointed out that Solana's own number of validators 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. Against this backdrop, discussing 'decentralization' carries a hint of 'the pot calling the kettle black.'
A more thorny issue comes from within the Solana ecosystem. The consistent 'favoritism' shown by many Solana Foundation executives has caused dissatisfaction among developers of other protocols.
'They will promote what they think is most beneficial for themselves. Just because a team meets a certain standard and pushing others away is turning friends into enemies,' said kdotcrypto, co-founder of Bulk.
The comment from Pacifica founder Constance was more restrained but equally impactful: 'We chose Solana in 2025, haven't taken any funding from the Foundation, haven't raised from investors, just wanted to build the product first and let the market decide.' Behind the phrase 'let the market decide' lies a subtle protest against the Solana Foundation's role as both 'referee and player.'
The most brutal truth in the crypto market is this: users don't care about grand narratives; they only care about depth, liquidity, and security. The rise of Hyperliquid is not just a technical victory but also a dimensional reduction attack on the 'general-purpose public chain' narrative—it proves that building the core of capital markets may not require a vast, complex ecosystem but rather an ultimate matching engine.
Now, Solana is mired in a quagmire of comparing 'decentralization metrics' with its competitors, and the Phoenix platform it heavily promotes still has a 20-fold trading volume gap 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 it will only drift further away from that dream of 'carrying global assets.'
