The Next Battle for Crypto Trading

The SpaceX IPO drove notable trading volume on Hyperliquid perps and Solana spot markets, with Backpack and Sunrise coordinating to list SpaceX spot trading on Solana on day one. Memory stocks including Micron, Sandisk, and a DRAM ETF followed shortly after. A perp stacks volume share chart showed gold near 60 percent, silver at 40 to 50 percent, then oil, then SpaceX sequentially dominating volume over time. Trading activity on Solana around these tokenized assets trended down in the week following their listings.

Backpack is releasing five to ten stocks per week targeting popular themes rather than listing everything at once, even though it could technically list the entire S&P 500 quickly. The primary constraint on listing velocity is not technical but rather headline impact and directing attention to the highest-volume targets, since simultaneous listings spread market maker liquidity too thin. Listing velocity is treated as critical because if a hot asset is not listed promptly, user appetite dissipates before the platform can capture it. Coordination with market makers is partly about giving them time to test and refine strategies for tokenized equities.

The tokenized equities market is described as being at a proof-of-concept stage, and the fact that nothing has broken yet is treated as a positive signal. Hyperliquid has had strong perps performance but spot activity there has never been strong, with Felix integrating Ondo for spot equities using RFQ making volumes hard to discern, and Denari's SpaceX spot listing on Hyperliquid dying down quickly. Solana has proven itself on spot trading with larger distribution than Hyperliquid, but Solana perps remain uncompetitive despite multiple teams attempting to build there, with technical improvements on unknown timelines and prerequisites still unfinished. Winner-takes-most dynamics similar to CME for futures and NASDAQ for equities could be replicated in crypto, with Hyperliquid dominating perps and Solana dominating spot, since perps and spot are not technically the same asset even when sharing the same ticker.

Coinbase is expected to offer something similar to Backpack but built on Base, and if it makes stock trading easy for its existing large user base, it could eat into Solana spot market share. Front-end trading platforms hold a structural advantage because users do not look underneath the hood and are unaware of what infrastructure is running beneath them. Coinbase could theoretically offer trading of Hyperliquid perps and other ecosystem spot assets via a front-end app without using its own chain, charging a surcharge on top. However, Coinbase, Kraken, and similar firms already have existing perps businesses, making it harder to simply abandon them and rebuild using Hyperliquid builder codes, and large public exchanges making five basis points instead of 100 basis points on perps would be a bad look to shareholders. Phantom's Hyperliquid integration has generated over 25 million dollars for Phantom and is described as objectively a great deal. Robinhood initially partnered with Kalshi for prediction markets, then spun out its own market-making operation called Rothera to capture more of that value, and its prediction market offering has grown significantly after internalizing market making.

Strategy authorized the ability to sell up to approximately 1.25 to 1.5 billion dollars worth of BTC if needed, though no BTC has been sold as far as the market is aware. Strategy stated it has approximately 24 months of runway, or approximately 30 months if it also sells extra BTC, to cover the STRK dividend, which was bumped up by 50 basis points to 12 percent. A prior guest argued Strategy should stop kicking the can down the road, sell some BTC, buy down STRK liabilities, and reduce leverage, but Strategy appears willing to continue playing with leverage and is hopeful BTC will keep going up. MicroStrategy and other companies that bought spot crypto assets at elevated prices are now trading at discounts to their MNAV.

Sam predicted that if Solana continues picking up tokenized equities activity and builds a fundamental picture, it could decouple from Bitcoin even if Bitcoin stays stagnant, and that Hyperliquid is an obvious case of real revenue generation through buybacks that could also decouple. Bitcoin has been accessible as an asset since ETF approval with no meaningful DeFi activity built on it, and the gold ETF launch was the major upcycle catalyst for gold, suggesting a similar moment may already be behind Bitcoin, with Bitcoin potentially entering extended sideways periods similar to gold punctuated by six-to-twelve-month explosive runs. Many L1s and L2s with little activity are expected to continue dragging down even if Bitcoin goes sideways.

Meme coins recovered to 26 percent of Solana spot DEX activity following a weekend spike tied to a ticker-pumping meme coin, while tokenized assets on Solana fell back to one to two percent of that activity despite having briefly flipped memes the prior Thursday and Friday. Speakers argued there is no meaningful new innovation in the meme coin space compared to when Pump Fun first launched, and the number of token creators on Pump Fun has declined back to pre-boom lows. If tokenized equities adoption grows, meme coins are expected to remain a side activity, but a Solana price recovery to the 200 to 300 dollar range was cited as a scenario that would likely drive significant meme coin activity higher. If tokenized equities bring a large new user base to Solana, meme coins are one click away and could serve as an onramp into speculative trading for those users.