Drift: Solana Beta with Optionality

Solana Beta

Trading on Solana

The story of the current crypto cycle cannot be told without Solana. The platform’s low median transaction fees and industry leading UX have made it a hub for retail risk taking and an emerging hub for protocol asset issuance. While some app chains today offer a similar UX and competitive fees, challenges of bridging, fragmented liquidity, a lack of composable opportunities, and high cost-per-click wallet flows have held back competing ecosystems. Retail risk capital has preferred Solana, as evidenced by monthly bridge flows, trading activity, and Solana’s TVL, which now meaningfully exceeds that of Arbitrum and Base. 

Solana continues to position itself as a leading onchain trading venue and hotbed of speculative activity – a highly positive progression in the network’s growth trajectory. Since Q4 of last year, both onchain perps and spot market volume on Solana have taken market share from competing chains. Solana perps and spot DEXs have realized over $900 million and $1.5 billion in daily volume respectively over the past 30 days, and Solana’s market share of total onchain volume has swelled to 11% for perps and 24% for spot. Volumes and market share have remained strong even as meme coin trading has shown evidence of slowing. 

Perps DEXs & Defensible Fundamentals

We believe perps DEXs can develop highly defensible revenues and capitalize on numerous cross selling opportunities at scale, making them more likely to become DeFi super apps than apps starting in any other sub-sector in DeFi.