SpaceX is a battleground Solana must win

SpaceX’s initial public offering last month was a headline-grabber for any number of reasons. As one of the largest IPOs ever, it briefly made founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire (and, a few days later, the first multi-trillionaire); it’s among the first of the major AI labs to go public; it debuted as one of the largest companies in the world, forcing new FAANG-like acronyms.

For stalwart veterans of the crypto trenches, however, it’s important for a different reason: it gave Solana and Hyperliquid, two of the places where SpaceX tokenized stocks and perps are most actively traded, fertile ground to fight over in the form of billions in perpetual futures (or “perps”) and tokenized stock volume, with both leading ecosystems scrambling for a slice of the trading pie.

Brian Smith is the president of the Jito Foundation, which supports the Solana network’s execution infrastructure and liquid staking ecosystem.

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.

It’s been an especially buzzy adoption cycle, as onchain platforms have become the site of early trading first for Nasdaq-listed equity of the AI chipmaker, Cerebras Systems and now SpaceX. What’s especially striking is that volume and participation were deep enough that these venues actually contributed to price discovery, meaning traders had a good idea of what the stock would likely trade at during its initial public offering. In fact, Cerebras Systems stock opened within 3% of its perps-implied price, and likewise SpaceX, with the implied perps price of $171 nearly perfectly matching the initial launch price, also at $171.

Now, there’s a case to be made that perps are just one crypto product among many — not an existential battleground. The winning chain will eventually become home for the vast majority of trading activity across spot crypto assets, commodities, stocks, prediction markets, gambling, etc — anything and everything someone can do with money, not just niche derivatives like perps.

I’m sympathetic to this view. Perps tend to be a product with low user counts driving high volume — hardly the portrait of global financial adoption. But this criticism obscures a bigger issue: however niche they may be, these derivatives are a leading force in bringing TradFi traders onchain.

The Cerebras Systems and SpaceX listings follow a period of months where the volume of RWAs onchain has been steadily multiplying, and traditional financial press has been covering how crypto derivatives platforms now allow traders to price commodities outside of market hours — weekends, holidays, and the 4PM-to-9:30AM dead zone.

Solana already has the speed, throughput, and cost structure to support these markets. Solana handles more daily transactions than all other blockchains combined. There is no version of this argument where someone credibly claims Solana can’t support high-frequency global derivatives trading. It obviously can. The gap is execution and focus. Hyperliquid has taken an early lead, not because they had better infrastructure, but because they were built specifically for derivatives traders. They shipped a product that was purpose-built for a specific user, and that specific user showed up.

The reality is that markets form where products are usable, liquid, and trusted, and not necessarily where infrastructure is strongest. CoinMarketCap is a graveyard of projects that hung their hats solely on technical advantages. Solana, despite its advantages, is not the default venue for this category, and that gap has been compounding.

Liquidity begets liquidity. Traders go where other traders already are. Every week that passes without a competitive Solana-native answer to the Hyperliquid trading experience is a week where the gravitational pull of the alternative gets harder to reverse.

Solana is winning on certain fronts, especially the recent launch of tokenized SpaceX stock trading on Solana venues representing a key win for the ecosystem, with [x.com]market commentators noting [x.com] that after the SpaceX IPO, 24-hour spot volume for tokenized stocks trading on Solana surpassed $100 million for the first time. This isn’t good enough, however, and Solana must win the battle for perps volume as well.

Tokenized commodities like SpaceX and macro derivatives are too important for Solana to lose. These markets represent real global demand — not crypto-native speculation, not memecoin volume, not another governance token no one asked for. Crude oil, gold, natural gas and pre-IPO equities are each trillion-dollar markets with existing participants who are actively searching for better venues. 24/7 access to these assets is a meaningful structural improvement over legacy markets, and where these markets form will determine where liquidity and price discovery concentrate for the next decade.