Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

In the cyclical nature of the cryptocurrency market, Solana once returned to its peak thanks to its "Ethereum killer" narrative and extreme performance. However, entering 2026, this once-powerful "high-performance computer" is facing unprecedented pressure to slow down, primarily reflected in its price.

In the past year, SOL's price has fallen by as much as 73.5% from its peak, the largest drop among all major cryptocurrencies. During the recent month-long market correction, SOL's upward momentum has also been very weak, significantly lagging behind other major cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH.

Furthermore, Solana's core vision of an "internet capital market" has also suffered a major blow amid internal and external troubles, which has forced the Solana Foundation's senior management team to speak out frequently recently and build momentum for their ecosystem in the public eye.

Solana's core narrative falters

Over the past few years, Solana has been trying to tell a story that is much grander than just "high-performance public blockchain".

According to the Solana Foundation, Solana's ultimate goal has been to transform into "Internet Capital Markets"—a global trading network that brings stocks, commodities, futures, perpetual contracts, and even all real-world assets onto the blockchain.

Today, the most prominent slogan that immediately catches the eye when you open the Solana official website homepage is still: "Capital markets for every asset on Earth."

This means that Solana not only aims to challenge Ethereum, but also seeks to replace traditional exchanges, brokerages, and clearing systems, becoming an on-chain version of Nasdaq. Its high speed, low fees, high throughput, relatively mature user experience, and strong support from Wall Street capital once made Solana seem like the public chain closest to achieving this goal.

The problem is that when the "Internet capital market" truly began to take shape, the market discovered that Solana was not necessarily the one occupying the core position.

Hyperliquid's unexpected impact

One of the biggest structural changes in the crypto industry over the past year has been the shift of the perpetual contract market away from traditional centralized exchanges (CEXs) and towards on-chain migration.

The biggest beneficiary of this trend is not Solana, nor Ethereum, Sui, or other networks, but Hyperliquid.

Initially, Hyperliquid was simply an on-chain perpetual contract trading platform, but as its Layer 1 strategy progressed, it gradually evolved into a complete financial infrastructure network. Compared to Solana's broad and abstract vision of "capital markets," Hyperliquid chose a more focused and transaction-driven path.

For a long time, while the Solana ecosystem has hosted a large number of DeFi projects, its core liquidity has consistently leaned towards spot trading, meme coins, and on-chain speculation. The infrastructure truly capable of supporting institutional-level trading depth, risk management, and high-frequency trading needs has remained immature.

More importantly, Hyperliquid has gradually proven something that many people have overlooked before: the "Internet capital market" does not necessarily need a universal ecosystem.

For high-frequency financial trading, performance, matching, liquidity, and trading experience are far more important than the richness of on-chain applications. This means that a vertical Layer 1 specifically designed for financial trading may be more suitable as the core of the on-chain capital market than a general-purpose public chain like Solana.

This is why more and more funds, traders, and attention are starting to converge on Hyperliquid.

Following the Drift incident, Solana was forced to adjust its perpetual contract market strategy.

If HyperLiquid squeezed Solana's strategic space in the "capital market" from the outside, then the Drift Protocol attack tore open a huge hole from the inside.

In early April this year, the Solana DeFi protocol Drift suffered governance and oracle attacks, resulting in losses of over $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 hack, the protocol's functionality was directly paralyzed, affecting a large number of assets, Vaults, and related protocols within the Solana ecosystem, and market confidence deteriorated rapidly.

Perpetual contracts are a fiercely contested area in the DeFi field. Faced with the market vacuum left by Drift and Solana's strategic gap in the field of on-chain derivatives, Solana must vigorously promote new alternative products to seize users and market share in the front line of Solana's "Internet capital market" strategy.

At this point, Solana faced a range of options, including 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 forwarding other industry professionals' Phoenix testing experiences, directly recommending Phoenix, or discussing his views on Phoenix.

Toly has repeatedly explained this "preference" by stating that Pacifica does not execute transactions on the Solana chain, its compatibility with Solana is as good as HyperLiquid, and Jup is already mature and more focused on the early-stage team from scratch. Meanwhile, Phoenix is ​​decentralized and can be atomically composed with all other applications on Solana.

Driven by Toly, Phoenix's popularity has remained in the top three of RootData's popular projects list for several consecutive days, and it has also set a new 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 daily trading volume had long been less than $4 million. Recently, riding the wave of market enthusiasm, its daily trading volume exceeded $80 million for the first time, but it still ranks outside the top 20 among all perpetual contract platforms, and is still more than 20 times behind the top 5 platforms (with a minimum of $1.6 billion).

Solana's propaganda offensive and internal divisions

Faced with Hyperliquid's rapid rise and the damage to its own ecosystem, Solana supporters have chosen a path that seems to be "using the enemy's own spear against him"—using decentralization as a weapon to launch a public opinion attack against Hyperliquid.

Solana Foundation member @harkl_ tweeted that Hyperliquid's slogan is a decentralized trading platform, but in reality it has 24 validator nodes, closed-source node code, a single bridge holding billions of dollars, and a record of forced settlements during market volatility.

"Can you use your own resources to participate in any part of the protocol stack without approval from a trusted third-party organization? If not, then it's not permissionless. No matter what you do, you can't run the Hyperliquid sorter," Toly further stated.

This argument sparked heated debate within the crypto community. Supporters argued that Toly hit Hyperliquid's core weakness—if there are fewer than 30 validators, the node code is not publicly available, and the bridge is highly centralized, then what is the fundamental difference between the so-called "on-chain capital market" and the custody model of a CEX?

Opponents point out that Solana's own number of validators has plummeted from 2,560 to about 756, the Satoshi Nakamoto coefficient has dropped from 31 to 20, and the top 20 validators control more than one-third of the staking share—in this context, talking about "decentralization" is somewhat like "the pot calling the kettle black."

A more pressing issue arises from within the Solana ecosystem. The unanimous "favoritism" among many Solana Foundation executives has sparked discontent among developers of other protocols.

“They will promote what they think is best for themselves, and push others aside just because a team meets a certain criterion, turning friends into enemies,” said kdotcrypto, co-founder of Bulk.

Pacifica founder Constance's comments were more restrained yet more damaging: "We chose Solana in 2025 without receiving any funding from the foundation or raising funds from investors. We just wanted to focus on making a good product 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 harshest truth about the crypto market is that users don't care about grand narratives; they only care about depth, liquidity, and security. Hyperliquid's rise is not only a technological victory but also a devastating blow to the narrative of "general-purpose public chains"—it proves that the core of building a capital market is not necessarily a complex ecosystem, but rather an optimal matching engine.

Today, Solana is mired in a battle with competitors over "decentralized metrics," while its flagship product, Phoenix, still lags behind mainstream derivatives platforms by a 20-fold increase in trading volume.

In this battle for the final outcome of the "Internet capital market," if Solana cannot regain 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 and further away from its dream of "carrying global assets."