A few years after the collapse of FTX nearly removed it from connectivity, Solana’s core builders say the network’s next phase will not be defined by survival, but by scaling to global finance.
Resilience built from the waste of 2022 is now shaping the future of Solana ecosystems, executives from Jupiter, Backpack, Kamino and DoubleZero argued at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 on Thursday.
“When FTX collapsed, it was the most brutal experience you can imagine,” said Armani Ferrante, founder of Backpack Exchange. Many startups in the ecosystem lost significant portions of their treasury.
Despite the shock, Solana retained its technical base.
“Solana didn’t lose any technical teams,” said Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and former chief strategy officer at the Solana Foundation. “It’s the developers who keep building throughout these markets.”
While Solana was known during the last cycle for the memecoin craze and speculative trading, the next chapter will focus on bringing more traditional finance on-chain, the panelists argued.
“The most important thing happening right now across any blockchain,” is all the finance coming on-chain, Ferrante said. Crypto, he added, remains small relative to global markets. “We have a proof of concept. That’s it.”
Builders emphasized that growth will depend on improving both infrastructure and user-facing products. Xiao Xiao Zhu, president of decentralized exchange aggregator Jupiter, said the value is increasingly coming to the application layer.
“Users absolutely don’t care if an application is built on Solana or Ethereum. It’s just about the user experience,” he said.
Upcoming upgrades aimed at reducing latency and improving 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 comfortable,” Federa said. “If you think you have a moat, it means someone is about to stab you in the back and take your lunch.”
Read more: Ethereum and Solana set the stage for 2026’s DeFi reboot
