Crypto has always rewarded the builders who stay when everyone else leaves. And nowhere is that truth more vivid than on Solana. At Consensus Hong Kong 2026, some of the most respected veterans in the Solana ecosystem took the stage to deliver a message that felt less like a prediction and more like a declaration: the Solana OG builders believe the network’s next chapter. Why Solana OG Builders Say the Next Chapter Is Bigger Than Meme Coins and FTX
The phrase “next chapter” is easy to throw around in crypto. But when it comes from Armani Ferrante, founder of Backpack Exchange, and Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and former head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, it carries a different weight. These are not newcomers riding a narrative wave. They are people who watched Solana’s darkest days from the inside and chose to stay anyway.
At the Consensus Hong Kong 2026 panel, Ferrante described the FTX collapse as “the most brutal possible experience you can imagine.” Many startups across the Solana ecosystem lost significant portions of their treasuries almost overnight. Confidence cratered. The media wrote obituaries. And yet the developers never left. Federa made this point sharply: “Solana lost no technical teams.” That single fact, quietly sitting underneath all the chaos and price drops, turned out to be the most important one of all. The Solana builder community proved that it operates independently of price action — and that resilience is now the foundation for everything that comes next.
From Meme Coins to Main Street: The Shift Solana Is Making
For much of the last two years, Solana’s identity in the public imagination was defined by meme coins. Platforms like Pump.fun made it extraordinarily easy to launch a token in minutes, and millions of retail traders flooded the network chasing overnight gains. The energy was real, the volume was massive, and for a while, Solana dominated the meme coin narrative in a way no other blockchain could match. BONK, Dogwifhat, Popcat — these tokens put Solana on the front page of crypto media every week.
But the Solana OG builders are now pointing toward something that dwarfs speculative token trading in every measurable way: the migration of global traditional finance onto the blockchain. Ferrante put it plainly at Consensus Hong Kong: “The single most important thing happening right now across any blockchain is all of finance coming onchain.” He acknowledged that current crypto markets remain a tiny fraction of global liquidity — essentially a proof of concept — and that the real opportunity is still largely untouched.
This is not a pivot away from Solana’s roots. It is a maturation. The same high-speed, low-cost infrastructure that made Solana the natural home for meme coin trading is now being positioned to power institutional-grade financial products, real-world asset tokenization, and global payment rails. The technical groundwork was quietly being laid throughout the meme coin era. Now the builders are ready to build on top of it in earnest.
How the FTX Collapse Became Solana’s Unexpected Crucible
It is impossible to tell Solana’s story without reckoning honestly with FTX. When Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange collapsed in November 2022, Solana was uniquely exposed. FTX held enormous quantities of SOL, and the network’s reputation had been closely tied to SBF’s public enthusiasm for the chain. SOL dropped from over $200 to below $10. Entire projects evaporated. The broader crypto world assumed Solana was finished.
What happened next is the part that matters most for understanding why the Solana OG builders speak with such conviction today. The technical teams did not scatter. The core developers kept shipping code. The Solana Foundation made decisive moves to manage the overhang of FTX-held SOL, unstaking and redistributing holdings through trusted custodians to minimize prolonged sell pressure. And the developer ecosystem continued growing, month after month, largely out of sight of the mainstream crypto press that had already moved on.
The FTX collapse, as devastating as it was, functioned as a clearing event. It stripped away the builders who were only there for the bull market and left behind the ones who genuinely believed in what Solana’s technology could become. Austin Federa captured this dynamic precisely: “It’s the developers that keep building throughout these markets.” That cohort of committed builders is now positioned to lead the network’s most consequential phase.
The Technical Foundation That Makes This Next Chapter Possible
The Solana network did not just survive the FTX era — it rebuilt itself from the ground up during it. By 2025 and into 2026, the chain had undergone a technical transformation that dramatically changed its capabilities. The partial rollout of Firedancer, developed by Jump Crypto, introduced a second independent validator client that processes blocks significantly faster than the original. Network uptime improved dramatically, addressing one of the most persistent criticisms Solana had faced in its earlier years.
Transaction throughput scaled to handle the demands of serious institutional players. Real-world asset tokenization emerged as a major growth category, with Solana outpacing Ethereum in RWA growth during 2025. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund found a home on the network. Stablecoin supply on Solana reached nearly $17 billion by the end of 2025, with major traditional finance players including Western Union launching their own stablecoins on the chain.
Upcoming network upgrades are specifically designed to reduce latency to the levels required for high-frequency trading and institutional DeFi, the two areas where Solana’s OG builders see the largest addressable market. The chain that once struggled with downtime during peak meme coin season is now engineering itself to handle the demands of global capital markets.
Institutional Adoption Is Already Changing Solana’s Investor Base
The shift from speculation to substance is not just a narrative — it is already showing up in the data. By late 2025, multiple spot Solana ETFs had launched in the United States, with products from Bitwise on the NYSE and 21Shares on Cboe BZX among those receiving regulatory approval. Treasury firms had staked at least 12.5 million SOL, representing more than 3% of the current supply. Nearly $750 million in assets under management across these ETF products fundamentally changed SOL’s liquidity profile and investor base.
Jupiter, one of Solana’s most important DeFi protocols, announced a strategic investment deal to settle in JupUSD, signaling that the application layer is beginning to build the financial infrastructure that traditional institutions will need in order to operate onchain. These are not the moves of a meme coin chain. These are the early structural elements of a serious financial network.
Austin Federa’s warning at Consensus Hong Kong is worth taking seriously in this context. He cautioned that feeling “comfortable” in the blockchain space is a precursor to being overtaken by competitors. The Solana ecosystem is not resting on its institutional momentum. The builders are actively working to stay ahead of the technical and competitive demands of the next cycle.
What Finance Coming Onchain Actually Means for Solana
When Armani Ferrante says that all of finance coming onchain is the single most important thing happening across any blockchain, he is describing a transformation in scope that most people have not fully absorbed. The current global crypto market — despite all the headlines, all the ETF launches, and all the institutional interest — remains a small fraction of total global financial liquidity. Every major asset class, every payment system, every form of financial contract that currently exists in the traditional world represents a potential migration candidate.
Solana’s architecture — with its parallel transaction processing, sub-second finality, and fees that are effectively negligible — makes it one of the few blockchain networks realistically capable of handling that scale.
Real-world asset tokenization is the most visible expression of this trend today. Tokenized treasuries, on-chain equities, and stablecoin-denominated settlement systems are all growing rapidly on Solana. The network captured the leading position in RWA growth during 2025, surpassing Ethereum in this category. For the Solana OG builders, this is not a surprise — it is the early evidence of the thesis they have been building toward for years.
Beyond the Hype: Why This Cycle Is Different for Solana Builders
Every crypto cycle produces its share of bold predictions. What makes the current moment different for Solana’s builder community is the combination of technical maturity, institutional entry, and regulatory clarity that did not exist in previous cycles.
The Solana OG builders who stayed through the FTX collapse, who kept shipping through the bear market, who watched meme coins come and go while continuing to build infrastructure — they are now leading a network that is genuinely ready for the demands of global finance. The proof of concept era, as Ferrante acknowledged, is behind them. The build-out era is what comes next.
This does not mean the path is without risk. Competition from other high-performance chains remains intense. Regulatory environments continue to evolve in ways that can reshape the landscape quickly. And the Solana ecosystem has learned from hard experience that overconfidence can be just as dangerous as underfunding. But the structural conditions for Solana’s next chapter are more favorable than at any previous point in the network’s history.
Conclusion
The story of Solana OG builders pressing forward beyond meme coins and FTX is ultimately a story about what serious long-term building looks like in crypto. It is not glamorous. It does not generate the kind of daily headlines that a new meme coin launch can produce. But it is the work that creates durable value — the kind that can support a global financial network rather than a speculative trading cycle.
If the Solana builders are right, and all of finance really is coming onchain, then the network’s most important years are still ahead of it. The meme coin era gave Solana visibility. The FTX collapse gave it character. And the institutional era that is now beginning will give it purpose at a scale that neither of those previous chapters could have provided.
If you want to stay ahead of how Solana’s next chapter is reshaping the future of decentralized finance, now is the time to pay close attention to the builders — not the tokens. Follow the developers who stayed, track the infrastructure they are building, and watch how traditional finance comes onchain in real time.
See more: Can Solana Shed Its Memecoin Image in 2026? | Analysis
