Solana Foundation Recruits Teams to Build On-Chain Perpetuals and Derivatives
Coin Newsweek – June 2, 2026 – The Solana Foundation has officially announced a recruitment drive targeting teams to build fully on-chain perpetual contracts, derivatives, and related trading applications. The foundation will provide support through distribution channels, technical assistance, and funding to accelerate the expansion of the DeFi ecosystem on Solana.
Shifting Away from Hybrid Models
The move represents a concerted effort to attract developers who can transition existing products or build new ones exclusively on Solana’s blockchain. A key focus is on moving away from off-chain or hybrid architecture models toward complete, transparent on-chain execution. The foundation is specifically seeking teams whose applications meet six core criteria, starting with fully on-chain execution. This means every component of the trading lifecycle—order submission, oracle updates, order matching, cancellations, and final settlement—must happen directly on-chain, ensuring transparency, auditability, and decentralization.
True Price Discovery and Solana-First Design
The foundation is also prioritizing applications that achieve competitive pricing through genuine price discovery. Rather than relying on a pooling or batch auction model, the foundation wants to see systems based on bidirectional order flow that allow the market to find fair prices organically. This design principle is intended to create healthier, more resilient markets that better reflect supply and demand in real time.
Another fundamental requirement is a Solana-first design philosophy. This means the application’s revenue must be structured to flow back to the network at the protocol level, reinforcing the economic alignment between builders and the Solana ecosystem. In practical terms, the foundation wants to see applications that cannot simply be redeployed on other blockchains without significant rearchitecture, ensuring that the value generated stays within Solana’s economic zone.
Innovation, Experience, and Open Source
The foundation is looking for teams that bring genuine innovation to the table. Preference will be given to builders who are willing to migrate existing off-chain or hybrid products to full-chain execution, bringing battle-tested experience into the fully on-chain world. Finally, all code must be open source, reflecting the foundation’s commitment to transparency and community-driven development. This open-source requirement also allows the broader Solana developer community to audit, learn from, and build upon successful projects.
Infrastructure and Complementary Products
Beyond core perpetual and derivatives applications, the Solana Foundation is also welcoming teams working on adjacent infrastructure and products. This includes front-end integration tools, vaults and structured products, aggregators that can route orders across multiple platforms, advanced trading interfaces for professional users, market-making operations that provide liquidity, and social trading features that allow users to follow and copy successful traders. The foundation recognizes that a thriving derivatives ecosystem requires not just the core trading engines but also the full suite of tools and services that surround them.
Teams interested in the program can apply through the foundation’s official channels. The foundation has not disclosed a specific funding cap, indicating that qualified teams will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis with support packages tailored to their specific needs and potential impact on the Solana ecosystem.
Building on Solana’s Momentum
This recruitment push comes as Solana continues to solidify its position as a leading blockchain for high-performance decentralized applications. With its low transaction costs and high throughput, Solana has become an attractive platform for derivatives trading, an area traditionally dominated by centralized exchanges. The foundation’s active support for development signals confidence that fully on-chain derivatives can match and potentially exceed the performance of their centralized counterparts while offering the transparency and self-custody advantages that define DeFi.
The coming months will reveal how many teams step forward and what innovations they bring to the Solana ecosystem. With funding, technical backing, and distribution support on the table, the foundation has created a compelling proposition for builders ready to push the boundaries of what’s possible in on-chain finance.
Sources: Solana Foundation Official Blog
Disclaimer: This content is for market information purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency investments involve high risk.
