Author: Hu Tao, Chain Hunter

In the cyclical trends of the cryptocurrency market, Solana once returned to its peak with the narrative of being an "Ethereum killer" and its extreme performance. However, entering 2026, this once-powerful "high-performance computer" is facing unprecedented slowing pressure, which is first reflected in its price.

In the past year, the maximum drop in SOL price from its high reached 73.5%, the largest decline among all mainstream cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, during the recent month’s market correction, SOL's upward momentum was also very weak, clearly lagging behind other mainstream cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH.

Moreover, Solana's core vision of "Internet Capital Markets" has suffered significant blows from both internal and external challenges, forcing the leadership team of the Solana Foundation to frequently speak out recently to gain public support for its ecosystem.

Solana's Core Narrative Encountered Setbacks

In recent years, Solana has been trying to tell a much grander story than just being a "high-performance public chain."

In the Solana Foundation's definition, Solana's ultimate goal 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.

Now, when you open the Solana official website, the most prominent slogan you see is: "A capital market built for every asset on Earth."

This means that Solana is not only aiming to challenge Ethereum but is also trying to replace traditional exchanges, brokerages, and clearing systems to become the on-chain version of Nasdaq. High speed, low fees, high throughput, and a relatively mature user experience, along with strong support from Wall Street capital, made Solana once viewed as the public chain closest to this goal.

However, the problem is that when the "Internet Capital Markets" actually began to take shape, the market found that what held a core position might not necessarily be Solana.

The Unexpected Impact of Hyperliquid

One of the biggest structural changes in the cryptocurrency industry over the past year has been the migration of the perpetual contract market from traditional CEXs to on-chain environments.

The biggest benefactor of this trend has not been Solana, nor Ethereum, Sui, or other networks, but Hyperliquid.

Initially, Hyperliquid was just an on-chain perpetual contract trading platform, but as its Layer 1 strategy progressed, it has gradually evolved into a complete financial infrastructure network. In contrast to Solana’s broad and abstract vision of a "capital market," Hyperliquid has chosen a more focused and trade-driven path.

For a long time, although the Solana ecosystem had numerous DeFi projects, its core liquidity has always been biased towards spot trading, Meme Coins, and on-chain speculation. The infrastructure capable of supporting institutional-level trading depth, risk management, and high-frequency trading demands has never matured.

More crucially, Hyperliquid is gradually proving something that many people previously overlooked: "Internet Capital Markets" do not necessarily require a universal ecosystem.

For high-frequency financial trading, the importance of performance, matching, liquidity, and trading experience far outweighs "richness of on-chain applications." This means that a vertically-focused Layer 1 designed specifically for financial trading 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 funds, traders, and attention are beginning to converge on Hyperliquid.

After the Drift Incident, Solana Forced to Adjust its Perpetual Contract Market Strategy

If HyperLiquid squeezed Solana's "capital market" strategic space from the outside, then the Drift Protocol attack incident tore a huge hole 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 contract protocols on Solana, Drift has always played a core liquidity role in Solana DeFi. After the hacker attack, the protocol's functions came to a standstill, severely impacting numerous assets, vaults, and associated protocols within the Solana ecosystem, and market confidence quickly deteriorated.

Perpetual contracts are a battlefield fiercely contested in the DeFi space; faced with the market vacuum left by Drift and Solana's strategic gap in on-chain derivatives, Solana's officials must heavily promote new alternative products to capture users and market share on the front lines of its "Internet Capital Markets" strategy.

At this point, Solana officials had several options including Pacifica, Phoenix, Jupiter, GMTrade, Bullet, and Blink. However, Solana's founder Anatoly Yakovenko firmly chose Phoenix.

In the past five days, Toly has published at least twenty tweets or retweets related to Phoenix, either forwarding other industry figures’ experiences with Phoenix, directly recommending usage of Phoenix, or discussing his views on Phoenix.

Regarding this "preference," Toly has repeatedly explained that Pacifica has not executed transactions on the Solana chain, that its compatibility is as good as HyperLiquid’s, and that Jupiter has already matured, so he is more focused on early teams going from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, Phoenix is decentralized and can be atomically composable with all other applications on Solana.

With Toly's influence, Phoenix's popularity has ranked among the top three in RootData's hot project rankings for several consecutive days, creating historical peaks in its popularity index.

However, in terms of trading volume, Phoenix still lags far behind other established perpetual contract platforms. According to DeFillama data, Phoenix's long-term daily trading volume was under $4 million, but recently, riding the market hype, its daily trading volume first broke $80 million, yet it still ranks outside the top 20 among all perpetual contract platforms, with a gap of over 20 times to the top 5 platforms (the lowest at $1.6 billion).

Solana's Public Relations Offensive and Internal Fractures

In the face of Hyperliquid's aggressive rise and its own ecosystem's wounds, Solana supporters have chosen a path that seems like "attacking the shield with the spear"—using decentralization as a weapon to launch a public relations attack on Hyperliquid.

Solana Foundation member @harkl_ tweeted that Hyperliquid's promotional phrases claim to be a decentralized trading platform, but the reality is 24 validator nodes, closed-source node code, a single bridge carrying billions of dollars in funds, and a record of forced settlements during market fluctuations.

"Can you participate in any part of the protocol stack using your own resources without the approval of trusted third-party institutions? If not, then it is not permissionless. No matter what you do, you cannot run the Hyperliquid sorter," Toly further stated.

This argument sparked intense discussions in the crypto community. Supporters believe that Toly has hit at the core vulnerability of Hyperliquid—if there are fewer than 30 validator nodes, the node code isn’t public, and the bridge is highly centralized, then how is the so-called "on-chain capital market" fundamentally different from the CEX's custodial model?

Opponents pointed out that the number of Solana's validators has sharply decreased from 2560 to about 756, with Nakamoto coefficient dropping from 31 to 20, and the top twenty validators control over one-third of the staking share—in this context, discussing "decentralization" seems somewhat like "the pot calling the kettle black."

An even trickier issue originates from within the Solana ecosystem. The unanimous "favoritism" shown by many senior members of the Solana Foundation has sparked dissatisfaction among many other protocol developers.

"They will promote what they believe is most beneficial to themselves, and simply push others away because a team meets a certain standard is turning friends into enemies," said kdotcrypto, co-founder of Bulk.

The remarks by Pacifica's founder, Constance, were more restrained but also more impactful: "We chose Solana in 2025 without receiving any funding from the Foundation and did not seek investment from investors; we just wanted to make a good product and let the market decide." This "let the market decide" carries an implicit protest against the Solana Foundation's dual role as "referee and player."

The cruel truth of the crypto market is that users do not care about grand narratives; they only care about depth, liquidity, and security. The rise of Hyperliquid is not just a technological victory, but a dimensional strike against the narrative of the "general-purpose public chain"—it proves that the core for building capital markets does not have to be a complex ecosystem, but an extreme matching engine.

Now, Solana is mired in the quagmire of competing on "decentralization metrics," and its favored Phoenix still has a 20-fold trading volume gap compared to mainstream derivatives platforms.

In this struggle over the eventual fate of the "Internet Capital Markets," if Solana cannot reclaim its dominance in the derivatives field by the second half of 2026, it may still be an excellent Meme paradise, but it will only drift further away from that dream of "carrying global assets."

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