The Solana ecosystem is no stranger to debating it’s the best home to create the future of internet capital markets. Perpetual futures and tokenized stocks have been Solana’s latest battleground, and for good reason. The current landscape is staggeringly profitable, but underneath the gaudy revenues driven by trading fees there’s an even more important adoption trend worth crossing swords over.
The single most bullish trend of 2026 for crypto has been traders turning to onchain derivatives platforms during the conflict with Iran. During this period onchain platforms became the venue where gold and crude oil were being repriced in real time while CME was closed. If Internet Capital Markets are going to come to pass, that eventually involves onboarding a class of users that, until perps, were reluctant, unable, or did not see the point in operating in crypto environments.
Right now they’re coming to crypto venues on Sundays. Soon it will be the whole week.
Put differently: perps are a trojan horse to bring all of traditional finance onchain. The current fees and users are an inarguable prize, but more important could be claiming the gateway that brings the rest of the system and its many trillions with them. Whoever wins the battle for Sunday volume might just win the whole war.
