Years after FTX nearly collapsed over correlation, Solana’s core builders say the network’s next phase will be defined not by survival but by expansion into global finance.
Resilience built from the ashes of 2022 is shaping the future of the Solana ecosystem, leaders from Jupiter, Backpack, Kamino and DoubleZero said Thursday at the Consensus 2026 Hong Kong conference.
“When FTX collapsed, it was the most brutal experience you can imagine,” Backpack Exchange founder Armani Ferrante said. Many startups in the ecosystem lost a significant portion of their funding.
Yet despite the onslaught, Solana has retained its technological underpinnings.
“Solana has not lost any technical team,” said Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and former director of strategy at the Solana Foundation. “It’s developers who keep building in these markets.”
Panelists believed that while Solana was known for memecoin mania and speculative trading in the last cycle, the next chapter will focus on bringing more traditional finance on-chain.
Ferrante said that “the most important thing happening on any blockchain right now” is that all finance is on-chain. He added that cryptocurrencies are still small relative to global markets. “We’ve got a proof of concept. That’s it.”
Builders stressed that growth will depend on improvements in infrastructure and user-facing products. Zhu Xiaoxiao, president of Jupiter, a decentralized exchange aggregator, said that the value of the application layer is constantly increasing.
“Users absolutely don’t care whether the application is built on Solana or Ethereum. It’s just about the user experience,” he said.
Upcoming upgrades designed to reduce latency and shorten confirmation times are expected to strengthen Solana’s pitch as a high-performance general-purpose execution layer. But the panel warned against complacency.
“The worst thing you can feel in blockchain is comfort,” Fedela said. “If you think you have a moat, that means someone is going to stab you in the back and take away your lunch.”
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