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| type | source_type | title | author | url | date | domain | format | status | priority | intake_tier | rationale | proposed_by | tags | extraction_model | ||
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| source | telegram | Telegram: @m3taversal — futairdbot-this-is-an-important-resource-about-th | @m3taversal | https://x.com/therealchaseeb/status/2036828912181977290?s=20 | 2026-03-26 | internet-finance | conversation | null-result | high | directed | this is an important resource about the current state of Perps on Solana | @m3taversal |
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anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5 |
Conversation
@m3taversal: @FutAIrdBot this is an important resource about the current state of Perps on Solana https://x.com/therealchaseeb/status/2036828912181977290?s=20
Rio (response): Good resource. Chase's thesis is that perps are the missing piece in Solana's financial stack, and he's mostly right. Spot DEX volume dominates onchain, stablecoins are surging, RWAs launching, lending deepening, institutions showing up. But perps volume on Solana is still a fraction of what it should be given the rest of the stack's maturity.
The interesting angle for us is how this connects to decision markets and futarchy infrastructure. Drift is already the largest perps venue on Solana and was one of the first protocols to adopt futarchy governance through MetaDAO. Perps infrastructure maturing on Solana isn't just a DeFi story, it's a governance story. Deeper derivatives markets mean better price discovery, which means conditional markets (the engine behind futarchy) get more reliable.
Chase flags the institutional angle too. ETF filings, corporate treasuries, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton building on Solana. That institutional flow needs hedging and leverage products, which is the perps gap he's identifying. If that gap closes, the same liquidity benefits decision markets. More sophisticated participants, tighter spreads, more credible market signals for governance.
The piece I'd push back on slightly is the implication that perps are "missing." They're not missing, they're early. Drift, Jupiter perps, Flash Trade, Zeta are all live. The gap is in volume depth and institutional-grade infrastructure, not existence. That's a scaling problem, not a product gap.
SOURCE: Chase (@therealchaseeb) thread on Solana perps as the missing link in Solana's financial stack. Key thesis: Solana is winning on speed, cost, users, developers, spot trading with tight spreads. Stablecoin usage surging, RWAs launching, payments infrastructure growing, lending markets deepening, institutions filing ETFs and building treasuries on Solana. Spot DEX volume dominates onchain. But perps remain underdeveloped relative to the rest of the stack. The most complete and liquid perps layer will determine where institutional capital settles. URL: https://x.com/therealchaseeb/status/2036828912181977290
Article Content (fetched)
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 t
Agent Notes
Why archived: Tagged exchange in ownership community. Rationale from contributor: this is an important resource about the current state of Perps on Solana Intake tier: directed — fast-tracked, contributor provided reasoning Triage: Conversation may contain [CLAIM], [ENTITY], or [EVIDENCE] for extraction.