Author: Hu Tao

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

In the past year, the maximum decline of the SOL price from its peak has reached 73.5%, the largest drop among all mainstream cryptocurrencies. Moreover, during the recent market correction in the past month, SOL's growth has also been very weak, clearly lagging behind other mainstream cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH.

Additionally, Solana's core vision of an "Internet Capital Market" has been hit hard by internal and external challenges, forcing the senior team of the Solana Foundation to frequently speak out recently to generate momentum for their ecosystem on public opinion.

Solana's Core Narrative Hit Hard

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

According to the definition of the Solana Foundation, the endgame of Solana 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, when you open the homepage of the Solana official website, the most eye-catching slogan is still: "A capital market built for every asset on Earth."

This means that 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, and a relatively mature user experience, along with strong backing from Wall Street capital, made Solana once seen as the public chain closest to this goal.

However, the problem is that when the "Internet Capital Market" really starts to take shape, the market finds that it may not be Solana occupying the core position.

The Unexpected Impact of Hyperliquid

In the past year, one of the biggest structural changes in the crypto industry is the migration of the perpetual contract market away from traditional CEX to on-chain.

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 contract trading platform, but as its Layer1 strategy progressed, it has gradually evolved into a complete financial infrastructure network. Compared to Solana's broad and abstract "capital market" vision, Hyperliquid chose a more focused and trade-driven path.

For a long time, although the Solana ecosystem had a considerable number of DeFi projects, its core liquidity always leaned more 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 always been immature.

More crucially, Hyperliquid has gradually proven something that many people previously overlooked: the "Internet Capital Market" does not necessarily require a generic ecosystem.

For high-frequency financial trading, the importance of performance, matching, liquidity, and trading experience far outweighs the "richness of on-chain applications." This suggests that a vertical Layer1 designed specifically for financial trading might be more suited to become the core of the on-chain capital market than a generic public chain like Solana.

This is also why an increasing amount of capital, traders, and attention are starting to converge on Hyperliquid.

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

If Hyperliquid has externally squeezed Solana's "capital market" strategic space, then the attack incident on Drift Protocol has internally torn a huge hole.

In early April this year, Solana DeFi protocol Drift suffered governance and oracle attacks, resulting in losses exceeding 200 million USD.

As one of the most important perpetual contract protocols on Solana, Drift has always played the core liquidity role in Solana DeFi. After the hacker attack, the protocol's functions were directly paralyzed, and a large number of assets, vaults, and associated protocols within the Solana ecosystem were affected, leading to a rapid deterioration of market confidence.

Perpetual contracts are fiercely competitive in the DeFi sector, and in the face of the market vacuum left by Drift and Solana's strategic gap in the on-chain derivatives field, Solana officials must vigorously promote new substitute products to capture users and market on the front lines of Solana’s "Internet Capital Market" strategy.

At this point, the options in front of Solana officials include a series of products like Pacifica, Phoenix, Jupiter, GMTrade, Bullet, and Blink. 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 retweeting other industry professionals’ testing experiences with Phoenix or directly recommending the use 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, its compatibility is as good as Hyperliquid, and Jup has already matured; he is more focused on early teams from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, Phoenix is decentralized and can be atomically integrated with all other applications on Solana.

Driven by Toly, the popularity of Phoenix has consistently ranked among the top three in the RootData hot projects leaderboard for several days and has created a historical peak 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 below 4 million USD, and recently, riding on market hype, its daily trading volume first broke through 80 million USD, but it still ranks outside the top 20 among all perpetual contract platforms, remaining over 20 times away from the top five platforms (the lowest being 1.6 billion USD).

Solana's Public Relations Offensive and Internal Fractures

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

Solana Foundation member @harkl_ tweeted that Hyperliquid's slogan is a decentralized trading platform, but the reality is 24 validating nodes, closed-source node code, a single bridge carrying billions of dollars in funds, and a record of forced liquidations during market volatility.

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

This discourse sparked intense discussion in the crypto community. Supporters believe Toly has hit the core vulnerability of Hyperliquid — if the number of validating nodes is less than 30, the node code is not public, and the bridge is highly centralized, then what essential difference does the so-called "on-chain capital market" have from the custody model of CEX?

Opponents point out that the number of Solana's validators has sharply declined from 2560 to about 756, the Nakamoto coefficient has dropped from 31 to 20, and the top twenty validators control over a third of the staked share — in this context, discussing "decentralization" seems a bit ironic, akin to "fifty steps laughing at a hundred steps."

A more tricky issue arises from within the Solana ecosystem. The unified "preference" among many senior members of the Solana Foundation has caused dissatisfaction among many other protocol developers.

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

Constance, founder of Pacifica, made a more restrained yet more powerful comment: "We chose Solana in 2025, did not take any funding from the foundation, nor did we raise funds from investors, only wanting to make a good product first and let the market decide." This phrase "let the market decide" hints at a veiled protest against the Solana Foundation's role as both referee and player.

The harshest truth in 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 blow to the narrative of the "general public chain" — it proves that the core of building a capital market does not have to be a bulky ecosystem, but rather an extreme matching engine.

Today, Solana is mired in a swamp of competing "decentralization metrics" against its rivals, while its promoted Phoenix still has a 20-fold gap in trading volume compared to mainstream derivatives platforms.

In the battle for the endgame of the "Internet Capital Market," if Solana cannot regain its dominance in the derivatives field in the second half of 2026, it may still be an excellent Meme paradise, but it will drift further away from that dream of "housing global assets."

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