Perps on Solana: The Missing Link

Solana is winning in many of the categories that matter. Speed, cost, users, developers, spot trading with some of the tightest spreads in crypto. The broader financial picture is coming together on Solana. Stablecoin usage is surging. RWAs are launching. Payments infrastructure is growing. Lending markets are deepening. Institutions are filing ETFs and building treasuries on Solana. Spot DEX volume already dominates onchain. The entire financial stack is assembling here. The most complete and liquid financial ecosystem wins. Financial Valhalla is within reach.

But there is one market that remains unfinished. The one that completes the picture. Perpetual futures. The largest, most liquid, most important market in crypto. The one that determines whether Solana becomes the financial layer for the world or falls short of its full potential. If we complete the perps picture, we become the financial layer. And yet when you look at who is actually building perps on Solana mainnet today, the list is short. Shorter than it should be for the most important market in crypto.

I spent the last month talking to market makers, perps teams, validators, and builders across the ecosystem to understand why Solana hasn't yet captured the most important market in crypto despite winning everywhere else. The answer is more complicated than the debate suggests. Microstructure is what everyone is debating, but it isn't a silver bullet. The products need to be better. More teams need to be building. And the chain has improved far more than most people believe.

The good news is that onchain perps are still early. The leaders aren't untouchable. Solana has every ingredient to build best-in-class perps products and take back meaningful market share. What follows is an honest look at the problem, the options on the table, and what it will actually take to win.

Why Perps

Perps have become the most important conversation on Solana today, and more broadly across every ecosystem in crypto. It's also become one of the most political conversations within the ecosystem. There are real disagreements about which path forward is best, who benefits, and what tradeoffs are acceptable. Some of that debate is healthy. Some of it is slowing us down. My only interest is that Solana wins, while maintaining all of its core properties that make it the greatest general purpose blockchain in the world.

Trading is where the users are, where the revenue is, where the real activity happens. And within trading, perps are the dominant instrument. They generate more volume than spot on every major exchange, centralized or decentralized. Since perps took off in 2019, they've often done 4 to 6x spot volume on major venues. That ratio is growing, not shrinking.

There's a deeper reason perps matter. If you want to bring the world's financial markets onchain, spot alone can't get you there. Spot requires custody of the underlying asset. A custodian for gold, a legal wrapper for equities, tokenization infrastructure for everything else. Slow and expensive. Perps skip all of it. A synthetic contract tracking a price. Any asset. No custody required. Anyone can trade it from anywhere. If Solana gets this right, every market on earth is accessible from one ledger. That's the prize.

Perp markets for equities, commodities, FX, crypto are launching every week, and the opportunity to host them on the most complete ecosystem in crypto is sitting uncaptured. Specialized chains like Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster, and Paradex built their own execution environments because general-purpose chains couldn't support derivatives trading well enough. Partly because of this, Hyperliquid alone does 10 to 15x the volume of every Solana perps platform combined (per DefiLlama). The market exists and it is massive. It just hasn't been captured here yet.

Solana is faster, cheaper, has more users, more apps, better infrastructure. Why aren't the perps here?

The reason perps aren't here comes down to many things. We need better products. We need better developer experience. We need more teams experimenting on perps. We need more makers and more retail trading here. None of these problems exist in isolation. They compound each other and they all have to be solved together. But every conversation I've had across this ecosystem keeps coming back to the same starting point. We don't have the makers willing to quote tight and deep.

Makers Rule Everything Around Me

Every liquid market runs on market makers. They stand ready to buy when you want to sell and sell when you want to buy. Without them you get wide spreads, thin books, and a market that feels broken whenever volume picks up. With them everything works. Prices are tight. Size is available. Traders show up because they can get filled.

Deep liquidity is what attracts big volume traders. Not features. Not token incentives. Not a good UI. Traders go where they can get size done at a fair price and they leave everywhere else. The best perps platform in the world with thin books loses to a mediocre one with deep liquidity. Every time. This is not a debatable point.

Market makers are businesses. They allocate capital to venues where they make money and pull it from venues where they don't. And because of this, most of them are choosing specialized chains today. We need to fix the things they need so they start quoting Solana perps and deepen our liquidity. No ecosystem advantage changes that math. If makers can't operate profitably, they won't operate at all. And without them, no amount of retail interest produces a market worth trading on.

When makers are here, everything works. Spreads tighten. Traders get better prices. Volume grows. Fees compound. Builders come because there is liquidity to build on top of. That is the version of Solana we are trying to build.

The cancel problem gets the most airtime, and it matters, but makers are telling me that ordering consistency and predictability is what they actually care about most. And fees are not talked about enough. They're telling me dev experience is hard, though getting better. They're telling me landing rates are much better than when this debate started, and no perp DEX has gone back to first principles and tried to fix what is already fixable. They want to quote on Solana. But between the technical challenges and not enough perp retail to justify the investment, it hasn't been worth it. We have options to start fixing these things. We've just been paralyzed by a debate that has dragged on too long and confusion around priorities. To understand what needs to change, you have to understand the problem underneath it all. Market microstructure. In the onchain perps war of the future, this is table stakes.

The Microstructure Problem

Market microstructure sounds technical but the idea is simple. The rules that determine how trades get matched. Who goes first. How fast you can update a quote. Whether prices are fair.

The prices you get on any exchange are a function of how many professional market makers are willing to quote there at size. Market makers quote on both sides of the book. More of them competing means tighter prices and deeper liquidity for everyone. When you get a good fill on a DEX, a market maker made that possible.

After spending the last month talking to market makers, perps teams, validators, and infrastructure builders across the ecosystem, one thing came through clearly in almost every conversation. The core problem is ordering. Everything else flows from there.

Removing toxic takers. Takers pick off stale quotes before makers can pull them. On Solana today, there is a lack of deterministic ordering. So makers widen their spreads to compensate for the risk. When it gets bad enough, they leave. The fix isn't to give makers an unfair edge over takers. It's to create a fair, predictable environment where makers can rely on their cancels landing when they should. On a CLOB, makers set their own prices based on their read of the market. When that market moves, they need to cancel fast. Right now the unpredictability of when and how that cancel lands forces makers to quote defensively. Fix the determinism and the spreads tighten naturally. Oracle freshness matters too, particularly for liquidations and mark price calculations, but for makers quoting on a CLOB the cancel problem is the primary one. Fix that first.

Scheduler consistency. This is the one I kept hearing over and over. The single biggest thing keeping serious market makers from committing capital to Solana perps right now is that they can't verify how ordering is actually happening, and they can't rely on it being the same from slot to slot. Professional firms need to know what game they're playing before they put money on the table. Right now, different validators run different schedulers with different sequencing logic. The rules change block to block. There's no way to audit it. There's no way to build a quoting strategy around it. The rational response is to widen spreads to cover the uncertainty, or to not quote at all. This isn't theoretical. I heard it directly. Firms are making that decision today.

Some will point to spot markets and say the current environment is fine. And for spot, maybe it is. But perps are a different animal entirely. You're managing leverage. You're managing liquidations. Positions can move against you fast and the cost of being wrong is not a missed fill, it's a blown book. Makers quoting perps need to update and cancel with precision under volatile conditions, on a consistent and verifiable execution environment. Spot tolerates ambiguity. Perps cannot.

Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. Some of the efforts underway to fix the ordering problem are actually making the consistency problem worse. More schedulers competing with different sequencing logic means more fragmentation, not less. More unpredictability. More slots where makers can't know what to expect. The people trying to solve microstructure are in some cases deepening the exact problem that's driving makers away.

The fee stack compounds everything. Base fees, priority fees, tips, and a growing number of external transaction landing services, each with its own sorting logic. Market makers I spoke with consistently said the chain is already too expensive. Every layer of fee opacity gets priced into wider spreads.

Solana can be first in every other category and still leave the market that generates the most economic activity uncaptured. Not through failure. Through inaction.

Fixing microstructure alone won't win perps, but it's the necessary condition for everything that follows.

Why Solana

The specialized chains figured out execution quality by controlling everything. Strict ordering, maker speed bumps, controlled validator sets. Tighter prices, deeper books. It works. A general purpose, decentralized blockchain cannot unilaterally do this without approval of those that run the network.

But they all made the same tradeoff. No composability. Capital locked in a silo. You can't use a perps position as collateral. You can't arb across protocols atomically. You can't route through lending and spot and derivatives in a single transaction. They got the prices right by giving up the thing that makes onchain finance worth building.

And there's a risk people don't talk about enough. These chains are centralized. Permissioned validator sets. Small teams controlling critical infrastructure. Not censorship resistant. They can be shut down, pressured, or compromised. The keys to the castle are in very few hands, and if those hands get hacked or make the wrong call, billions in user capital is exposed. We've seen what happens when centralized crypto infrastructure fails. Regulators are already questioning whether these specialized chains qualify as DeFi at all. If they're deemed effectively centralized exchanges without the compliance, the model breaks. That's a risk the ecosystem isn't pricing in.

Solana doesn't have to choose. For the first time, it can have the best prices, the deepest liquidity, full composability, and real decentralization without trading away the things that make onchain finance worth building. Every application on the same ledger, every asset interacting atomically, no single point of failure. That is the whole point.

Hyperliquid started narrow and nailed the one thing that prints the most money. Solana started broad and built the most complete ecosystem in crypto. But the execution layer wasn't designed for market microstructure at today's scale. Neither path was a mistake. But Solana's path is the one that leads somewhere bigger. The foundation for everything is already here. The gap is just the execution layer, and it's costing us today. I don't think the urgency of closing it is felt widely enough.

There Is No Silver Bullet

Onchain perps are still early. There are clear leaders today, but none of them are perfect. The products, the experience, the market coverage all have room to be beaten. Solana still has a real window to build best-in-class perps and take back meaningful market share. But that window won't stay open forever.

Fix microstructure and the market makers come back. The market makers come back and liquidity deepens. Liquidity deepens and the perps volume follows. It's a clean story. I believed a version of it too.

But the more conversations I had, the more that story fell apart.

Look at the specialized chains. dYdX built their own chain from scratch, optimized entirely for derivatives. The execution quality improved. But volume collapsed after launch and never recovered. There were product decisions and tokenomics at play, but the underlying problem was the same. They couldn't generate sustained retail flow. Liquidity without retail flow is just capital sitting in a room waiting for something to happen. Without the other side of the trade, makers eventually leave anyway. dYdX is a cautionary tale that doesn't get told enough in this debate.

That sequencing matters. Infrastructure first, then distribution. Most chains get the infrastructure right and assume distribution takes care of itself. It doesn't.

Solana actually has the distribution problem solved in reverse. We have the retail. Millions of users who already live on this chain, who already swap, who already speculate. The spot traders are here. The memecoin degens are here. The question isn't how to attract retail to a new perps product. The question is why those same people aren't already trading perps here, and the honest answer is that the products haven't been good enough to pull them in.

That's a product problem as much as it is a microstructure problem. The interface, the experience, the markets available, the reason to choose a Solana perps platform over just opening Hyperliquid on another tab. Those things don't get fixed by protocol upgrades. They get fixed by builders who obsess over them.

Microstructure is the floor. You cannot build a competitive perps market without it. But a better floor doesn't fill the building. Winning perps on Solana requires the execution environment, the products, and the distribution strategy all working together. We've been so focused on the first one that we've underinvested in thinking about the other two.

The path forward isn't just fixing the chain. It's building things people actually want to use, and making the case loudly that Solana is where serious trading happens. We have every ingredient. What's missing is the builders willing to use them.

And that's the part that concerns me most. The "microstructure will fix us" narrative has been running for two years now. Teams have been waiting. Waiting for the protocol to catch up, waiting for the right infrastructure, waiting for the perfect conditions to build. The result is that we have a handful of teams actually trying, and some of the newer ones have already given up on mainnet entirely and gone the sidechain route.

It's worth noting that when this debate started, landing rates were genuinely bad and congestion was a real problem. But Solana today is meaningfully different. Bigger blocks, better performance, better developer tooling. The chain has improved substantially and no one has gone back to test the assumption. No one has tried to build a perps product from the ground up with fresh eyes on what's actually possible now. Part of that is rational. Market makers tell me they don't see enough retail demand for perps on Solana to justify the investment. But retail demand doesn't appear out of thin air. It follows good products. There are no great perps products on Solana, so there is no retail perps flow, so there is no maker interest, so there are no great perps products. The chicken and the egg. Someone has to go first.

We need more teams building perps on Solana right now. Rapidly experimenting, shipping, failing, and trying again. The ecosystem rewards that. The users are here for it. Two more years of waiting for a protocol fix while this opportunity sits uncaptured is not a strategy. It's a choice.

Retail Is The Game

Everything in this essay, the microstructure debate, the maker problem, the product gap, all of it is in service of one thing. Getting retail traders to show up and trade perps on Solana.

Retail is the demand side. They are the uninformed flow that makes market making profitable. Arguably the most important piece of the puzzle, even more important than infrastructure. Fix the execution environment and still have no retail, and you have nothing. When retail trades, makers earn. When makers earn, they quote tighter. When spreads tighten, more traders show up. Without them, you don't have a market. You have infrastructure with nobody in it. And makers, rational businesses that they are, won't commit capital to a venue without flow. Retail and makers aren't separate problems. They're the same problem. Each one is waiting on the other. The relationship is symbiotic. One cannot thrive without the other.

This is the part that gets lost in the debate. Everyone is focused on the supply side. But none of it moves without retail flow underneath it.

Solana has something most perps platforms had to build from scratch. An existing retail base. Millions of active users who already trade onchain every day. They swap tokens, they ape into memecoins, they lend and provide liquidity for yield, they are deeply active on this chain every single day. The behavior is already there. The risk appetite is already there. What isn't there is a perps product good enough to capture it.

That's the opportunity. You don't need to go find retail. You need to give the retail you already have a reason to stay and trade perps instead of opening a new tab. Better products. Better markets. Better onboarding. A reason to choose Solana over whatever else is one click away.

When that happens, the maker problem starts solving itself. Makers follow flow. Give them retail volume worth quoting against and the economics work. The conversation shifts from "how do we convince makers to come here" to "how do we keep up with the makers who want in." That's the version of this story where Solana wins.

Everything else is building toward that moment. Retail is the game.

What We're Doing Today

Not everything requires waiting on a protocol upgrade. There are meaningful improvements already in motion that address some of the core problems makers have been raising.

Anza is actively working on changes that will push Solana toward 200ms block times. Faster blocks mean tighter windows for the timing games that some validators have been playing. When the gap between slots shrinks, the ability to exploit ordering ambiguity shrinks with it. This doesn't solve scheduler consistency entirely, but it reduces the surface area for the problem.

The Solana Foundation Delegation Program has also put real teeth into censorship resistance and scheduling consistency. SFDP participants must now use either FIFO or priority-fee-ordered scheduling within a 50ms window, must not censor or delay transactions received on TPU, and must meet new decentralization requirements around ASN and datacenter concentration taking effect May 1st 2026. These aren't suggestions. Validators who don't comply lose stake delegation. Stake is the economic lifeblood of a validator. Using it as a lever to enforce better behavior is one of the most direct tools available without a protocol change. It won't solve everything, but it meaningfully narrows the space for the timing games and censorship that have been making makers' lives harder.

The Options

The good news is that we are not without options. Solutions exist at every layer of the stack. At the protocol level, at the infrastructure level, at the application level, and even within the current protocol today. The debate isn't whether to act. It's which layer to prioritize, how fast we can move, and what tradeoffs we're willing to accept at each one. Regardless of any of this, teams need to start building now. Not waiting for a silver bullet.

At the protocol level, MCP (Multiple Concurrent Proposers) looks to be moving forward, albeit slowly. This will help greatly with censorship resistance and better ordering, but the crux of the issue is the design. Priority fee ordering by CU is the working design and after nearly a year it still hasn't shipped. At the middleware level, there are strong proponents of fixing things now and accepting short-term tradeoffs to stay competitive while the protocol catches up. At the application level, teams are finding creative ways to work within the constraints of the current chain, and some of those workarounds are already producing results without waiting on anyone. And then there are the teams who couldn't wait at all. Some are building fully onchain today. Others have moved to sidechains. Both tell you something about where confidence in the mainnet path currently stands.

Here is the honest breakdown of what's on the table.

Protocol Level

MCP (Multiple Concurrent Proposers). Protocol-enshrined, censorship resistant, enforced at the base layer ordering without trusting any single entity. But timelines keep shifting and there is a huge disagreement on the ordering implementation rules.

MCP is moving in the right direction but the merge rule for how transactions get ordered inside it is heavily debated. That design question has been open for too long. We must move forward. While the ecosystem waits, here are the approaches on the table.

Priority Fee Ordering by CU (many refer to this as FBA). The current design being worked on. Transactions are collected from multiple proposers in short auction windows and ordered by priority fees before execution. The argument for it is that competitive fee markets drive revenue to validators, the network and SOL holders. And the network gets global information incorporated into the chain as fast as physics allows, rather than as fast as it can reach a single leader. The argument against it is that during the auction window onchain execution pauses while prices keep moving everywhere else. Makers can still get picked off at the end of the window. And the chain is already expensive. This merge rule during high volatility, exactly when makers need to cancel fastest, makes it more expensive at the worst possible moment, although since cancels are cheap its not necessarily a huge problem.

FIFO (First In First Out). Pure time ordering. Whoever sends first gets executed first. Simple in concept, but implementing true FIFO on a decentralized system is genuinely hard. There is no single authoritative clock across thousands of validators in different geographies. What counts as "first" is ambiguous by design. Beyond the technical challenge, FIFO has a fairness problem. In practice it rewards whoever has the most money and the fastest infrastructure. That's the same dynamic that dominates traditional finance, where HFT firms spend billions for a speed edge. Decentralized networks are supposed to be a more level playing field. Pure FIFO undermines that.

Protocol-Level ACE (Application-Controlled Execution). ACE isn't necessarily in conflict with either of the above. ACE is about letting applications define their own ordering rules within their execution context. A perps platform enforces maker cancel priority. A lending protocol ensures margin replenishment before liquidation. Protocol-level ACE can sit on top of FBA or FIFO at the block level, enshrined at the base layer and enforced without trusting any single entity. This is effectively what specialized chains like Hyperliquid are already doing, controlling everything end to end. But there are countless possible configurations and no guarantee that any one of them is optimal. The question for Solana is whether ACE gets enshrined at the protocol level or left to middleware and application teams to implement themselves.

The options above represent what's being considered, not what's been decided. Every month without a decision is another month the ecosystem waits, builders stay on the sidelines, and the opportunity sits uncaptured.

Middleware Level

These solutions sit between the protocol and applications. They can ship faster than protocol changes but they introduce new trust assumptions. Validators have to opt in. Power shifts to the teams running the infrastructure. The centralization concern is real: giving control over block building to a single product or team is exactly what decentralized networks are supposed to avoid. But some of these options are live today and producing measurable improvements.

BAM. Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace runs inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to provide privacy and verifiable ordering, although at the time of this writing, ordering is not yet verifiable. TEEs are a meaningful step, but their security guarantees remain highly debated, with known side-channel vulnerabilities and an ongoing question of how much trust you're actually placing in hardware manufacturers. But the honest picture: ACE plugins, the part that gives applications control over ordering, haven't shipped yet. BAM today is a better scheduler, but the app-level customization that makes it "ACE" is still coming. There's also the centralization question. BAM nodes are currently run by Jito. The code is being open-sourced and validators can disconnect at any time, but the concern is real and it's slowing adoption. BAM hands over a lot of power to Jito, and the centralizing nature is what we've historically steered away from. But it could be worth it in the short term to compete, if we can't compress the MCP timeline and agree to enshrine ACE. It's imperfect. It's controversial. It's also the closest thing to live ACE infrastructure we have.

Harmonic. A block building aggregation layer that collects block proposals from multiple competing builders and lets validators choose the best one based on their own criteria. The design is open and competitive by intent, and claims to support maker priority and optional ACE integration. On paper it addresses real problems. In practice, all three builders currently running on Harmonic are operated by the same team, which raises legitimate questions about how competitive the market actually is today. The deeper issue is that competing schedulers with different sequencing logic running across different validators is itself a consistency problem. Makers still can't rely on the same rules slot to slot. No voluntary coordination fully solves this. As long as discretionary sequencing is permitted and profitable, some validators will defect.

Scheduler Speedbump. Implement basic maker priority at the scheduler level. Maker cancels get processed before taker fills. No protocol changes, no new infrastructure. This alone would tighten spreads and bring some market makers back. But the challenge is coordination. Every scheduler implementation has to agree and adopt the same rules. With multiple block builders and validator clients in the ecosystem, getting uniform adoption is harder than it sounds. The limitation beyond that is that current implementations are one-size-fits-all. Every app gets the same ordering rule. A perps platform can't define different logic than a lending protocol. It's not elegant. It's not customizable. But it would help, if the ecosystem can actually coordinate around it.

Application Level

These are the options available right now. No protocol changes needed. No validator coordination. No new infrastructure to adopt. DeFi teams can start building with these today, and they should. Waiting for the perfect solution at the protocol or middleware level while doing nothing at the application level is the worst possible outcome. Some of these break composability. Some only solve one team's problem. But they let builders iterate immediately, and iteration is how you find what works.

Phoenix. Solving maker priority at the application level without any protocol changes or external infrastructure. Phoenix uses a compute unit asymmetry where market maker quote updates cost around 5,000 CUs while taker orders cost around 150,000 CUs. That 30x difference means makers effectively land before takers most of the time, because block builders weakly prefer higher priority per compute unit. It's not a hard guarantee, and it's still subject to slot-to-slot inconsistency depending on the leader, but it tightens spreads meaningfully within the current system. Phoenix shows what's possible when a team stops waiting and builds around the constraints they have. The limitation is that it's probabilistic, not deterministic, and every app has to engineer its own workaround independently.

Archer Exchange. Archer implements program-level ACE through async markets, introducing a configurable slot delay on taker orders. The key insight: taker orders are recorded onchain when placed, but executed at the maker's live price at the moment of execution, not the stale price the taker originally saw. This kills the latency arbitrage edge entirely. If an arb knows their order will fill at whatever price the maker is quoting 350ms from now, the expected value of the trade collapses. The maker will have already updated. Toxic flow self-selects out. What remains is predominantly uninformed retail flow, the kind makers actually want to fill. Archer also supports continuous markets alongside async markets, preserving composability for liquidations and cross-protocol interactions that need immediate settlement. No protocol changes needed. No new infrastructure. It's live on mainnet in private beta today. The limitation is that Archer is currently spot only. Perps are the prize, and whether this model translates cleanly to a perps CLOB remains to be seen. But as a proof of concept for what program-level ACE can do for market microstructure on Solana, it's the most concrete example we have.

Bulk Trade. Takes a different approach entirely by building their own L1 that runs inside their validator client, with a matching engine designed specifically for perps. They can match every 20ms with user funds locked in a Solana account, while execution happens off Solana. It's a meaningful trust improvement over fully leaving Solana, since custody remains onchain, but execution happens off Solana. Validators running Bulk earn 12.5% of trading fees, but only those running the Bulk client benefit, so it doesn't accrue to the broader Solana validator set. By definition this is not REV, albeit it does help pay for a portion of the network. It's better than traders leaving Solana entirely, but it doesn't move the needle economically for the underlying network. Solid design, and notably one of the few approaches that can actually attract makers today. The reason Bulk exists is because they saw no viable path to competitive perps on Solana mainnet. This will change as the Solana execution environment improves, but their solution tells us something important about the current state of things.

What Now?

The problem is clear. The debate has gone on long enough. It's time to move.

MCP needs to get done. The direction is correct. But after nearly a year, the design still isn't fully finalized. The priority fee by CU merge rule for MCP needs to ship if this is our intended path. It's all theory until this lands in production. Every month without a working implementation is another month of paralysis, another month builders wait on the sidelines, and another month this opportunity sits uncaptured.

But we cannot wait for MCP to start building. That's the trap we've been in for two years and it's killing us. The chain today is meaningfully better than it was when this debate started. Landing rates are better. Blocks are bigger. The tooling has improved. Nobody has gone back to test what's actually possible on mainnet right now. That has to change.

We need builders. Not one or two teams. Dozens. Experimenting with different approaches, different products, different configurations. Some will fail. That's fine. Failure on mainnet is more valuable than a perfectly reasoned argument for why you're waiting. Phoenix didn't wait. They found a way to make maker priority work within the current system. Every team building perps today, even imperfectly, is advancing the state of the art and signaling to the ecosystem that this is worth investing in.

We need better products. The microstructure debate has consumed so much oxygen that the product conversation has barely started. What does a great perps experience look like on Solana? What markets should exist here that don't exist anywhere else? What would make a retail trader choose a Solana perps platform over opening Hyperliquid on another tab? These are product questions, not protocol questions, and they need to be answered by builders willing to obsess over them.

And we need to give retail a reason to trade perps here. Solana has millions of active users who are already taking risk, already speculating, already living onchain. They are one good product away from trading perps. That product doesn't exist yet. Build it.

The infrastructure is here. The users are here. The liquidity is here. What's missing is the conviction that this is worth doing now, before everything is perfect. It never will be. The chains that win are the ones where builders don't wait for permission.

Solana was built by shipping. It's time to remember that.