A few years after FTX’s collapse nearly brought it down by association, Solana’s top builders say the network’s next phase will be defined not by survival, but by expansion into global finance.
The resilience built from the rubble of 2022 is now shaping the future of Solana ecosystems, the leaders of Jupiter, Backpack, Kamino and DoubleZero argued at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 on Thursday.
“When FTX crashed, it was the most brutal possible experience you can imagine,” said Armani Ferrante, founder of Backpack Exchange. Many startups in the ecosystem lost a significant part of their treasuries.
However, despite the shock, Solana retained his technical base.
“Solana didn’t lose any technical teams,” said Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and former chief strategist at the Solana Foundation. “It’s the developers who continue to build in these markets.”
While Solana became known during the last cycle for the memecoin mania and speculative trading, the next chapter will focus on bringing more traditional finance into the chain, the panelists argued.
“The most important thing happening right now on any blockchain” is that all finance goes on the chain, Ferrante said. Cryptocurrencies, he added, remain small relative to global markets. “We have a proof of concept. That’s all.”
Builders emphasized that growth will depend on improving both infrastructure and user-oriented products. Xiao Xiao Zhu, president of decentralized exchange aggregator Jupiter, said value is increasingly accrued at the application layer.
“Users don’t care at all whether an app is built on Solana or Ethereum. It’s just about the user experience,” he said.
Upcoming updates aimed at reducing latency and improving commit times are expected to strengthen Solana’s presentation as a general-purpose, high-performance execution layer. But the panel warned against complacency.
“The worst thing you can feel in blockchain is comfort,” Federa said. “If you think you have a moat, that means someone is about to stab you in the back and take your lunch.”
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