Solana Wants a Piece of Hyperliquid’s Multi-Trillion-Dollar Trading Empire

Hyperliquid has become one of crypto's biggest success stories. Now, Solana wants in.

This week, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko publicly backed the development of a new perpetuals DEX built natively inside the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), signaling that the ecosystem sees decentralized derivatives as one of the most important opportunities in crypto today.

The comments surfaced as Hyperliquid co-founder Jeffrey Yan was in Washington meeting with policymakers and discussing the regulatory future of onchain derivatives as the CLARITY Act advances through Congress.

While Hyperliquid focuses on regulatory positioning and continued growth, a separate debate emerged across X around whether Solana should build its own native perpetuals exchange to compete.

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Why Solana Wants Its Own Perpetuals Infrastructure

The discussion began after Yakovenko encouraged users to try a new Solana-based perpetuals DEX currently under development.

Critics questioned whether crypto really needs another perpetuals exchange when Hyperliquid already dominates the sector.

Yakovenko argued the issue isn't replication—it's infrastructure.

According to him, Solana needs an atomically composable perpetuals protocol that operates directly within the SVM, allowing developers to integrate derivatives trading directly into applications, wallets, and financial products without relying on external ecosystems.

“Solana’s SVM needs an atomically composable perp DEX in its runtime so innovation can flourish,” Yakovenko wrote. “Apps built inside the SVM can’t use HL because you have to bridge there.”

The argument reflects a broader trend across crypto: major ecosystems increasingly want critical financial primitives—including stablecoins, lending, payments, and derivatives—to exist natively inside their own environments.

Hyperliquid Has Become One of Crypto’s Biggest Businesses

The debate also highlights just how large Hyperliquid has become.

Since launching, Hyperliquid has processed more than $4.3 trillion in cumulative trading volume, making it the dominant force in decentralized perpetuals trading.

Over the past 30 days alone, the platform has generated roughly $186 billion in trading volume, while maintaining approximately $9 billion in open interest across its markets.

The platform now controls an estimated 30%+ of the decentralized perpetuals market, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing protocols in crypto.

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Its native token, HYPE, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar asset with a market capitalization exceeding $10 billion, while the protocol itself has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and revenue.

For many observers, Hyperliquid has already proven that traders are willing to move significant activity away from centralized exchanges and onto self-custodial infrastructure.

For Solana, those numbers represent opportunity.

“The 10B OI is the opportunity,” Yakovenko wrote, referring to open interest. “Why wouldn’t I want Solana to compete for the chunk of the global market?”

A Much Bigger Market Than Crypto

Despite Hyperliquid's success, decentralized perpetuals remain tiny compared to traditional financial markets.

Binance, CME, Coinbase, NYSE, and other major exchanges collectively process multiples of the volume currently seen across the entire onchain derivatives sector.

That reality is a major part of Yakovenko's thesis.

Rather than viewing Hyperliquid as a winner-take-all platform, he sees it as validation that there is significant demand for decentralized trading infrastructure—and that multiple winners can still emerge.

The key differentiator, according to Solana supporters, is composability.

Hyperliquid operates as a highly optimized standalone trading environment. A Solana-native perpetuals protocol, meanwhile, could become embedded directly into wallets, lending markets, AI agents, prediction markets, structured products, and countless other applications built across the ecosystem.

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The Next Major Battleground

The discussion attracted attention from several prominent industry figures, including Simon Dedic, who argued that Yakovenko's enthusiasm alone was enough reason to pay attention.

More broadly, the conversation reflects where competition in crypto is heading next.

The last cycle was dominated by Layer-1 wars.

This cycle increasingly revolves around ownership of financial infrastructure: stablecoins, tokenized assets, payments, lending, and derivatives.

Hyperliquid currently leads the perpetuals category by a wide margin. But with Solana openly signaling its intent to compete, one of crypto's most lucrative markets may be entering its next phase.

And if Hyperliquid's growth is any indication, the prize could be worth billions.