From FTX debris to global finance: Solana’s 2026 plan is all about the application layer

A few years after the collapse of FTX nearly took it down by association, Solana’s core builders say the network’s next phase will be defined not by survival, but by scaling into global finance.

Resilience built from the debris of 2022 is now shaping the Solana ecosystems future, leaders from Jupiter, Backpack, Kamino and DoubleZero argued at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 on Thursday.

“When FTX collapsed, it was the most brutal possible experience you can imagine,” said Armani Ferrante, founder of Backpack Exchange. Many startups in the ecosystem lost significant portions of their treasuries.

Yet despite the shock, Solana retained its technical base.

“Solana lost no technical teams,” said Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and former head of strategy at the Solana Foundation. “It’s the developers that keep building throughout these markets.”

While Solana became known during the last cycle for memecoin mania and speculative trading, the next chapter will center on bringing more traditional finance onchain, the panellists argued.

“The single most important thing happening right now across any blockchain,” is all of finance coming onchain, 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 value is increasingly accruing to the application layer.

“Users absolutely do not care whether 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 cautioned against complacency.

“The worst thing you can feel in blockchain is comfortable,” Federa said. “If you think you’ve got a moat, that means someone’s about to knife you in the back and take your lunch.”

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