The Solana Foundation is putting money behind teams that build fully onchain perpetual futures — a direct challenge to Hyperliquid's dominance in crypto derivatives. Perps remain one of the most profitable trading segments in crypto, but most volume still flows through centralized exchanges or hybrid offchain venues. Solana thinks it can change that without sacrificing the speed institutions and traders need.
What Solana wants from builders
The Foundation isn't just handing out grants. Funded projects have to be Solana-first, meaning revenue gets routed back to the chain at the protocol level from day one. Every part of the trade — order submission, oracle updates, matching, settlement — must happen onchain. No hybrid shortcuts. Teams that already run offchain or hybrid perps on other chains are welcome to migrate, but the final product has to be a fully onchain system.
Two-sided flow, not pool-based pricing
Solana is also pushing a specific pricing model: orderbooks or RFQ systems that match two-sided flow, rather than pool-based or deposit-dependent pricing that many DeFi perps use. The thinking is that orderbook-style liquidity is more familiar to professional traders and can support the depth Hyperliquid already offers. Open-source development is mandatory, so the code is auditable and the community can build on it.
Why Hyperliquid is the target
Hyperliquid has become the reference point for onchain derivatives — it proved there's real product-market fit in crypto perpetuals. But it runs its own L1 and keeps much of the execution offchain. Solana's bet is that a truly onchain perp on a high-throughput L1 can match that performance while giving users full transparency and composability. Whether the network can actually handle that kind of traffic under sustained volume is the open question.
Funding and next steps
Grants will come from the Solana Foundation directly or through local Superteam chapters. The Foundation hasn't disclosed a total budget or a deadline for applications, but expects to start working with teams soon. For any project already live with a hybrid perps product, the migration timeline and the Solana-first revenue model are the main hurdles they'll need to clear to get funded.
