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.
Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.