Solana Launches $1M Frontier Traders Competition to Take on the Perps Market

Solana has launched Frontier Traders Season 1, an eight-week perpetual futures trading competition designed to increase engagement across its growing derivatives ecosystem.

The program offers more than $1 million in rewards, including a Porsche 911 GT3 RS or $250,000 in cash for the final winner. The competition runs from September 21 to November 7, with traders competing for leaderboard rankings, weekly prizes, and the title of Frontier Traders World Champion at Solana Breakpoint in London.

A Network-Wide Push for Perps Adoption

On September 15, Solana introduced Frontier Traders as a network-wide program that tracks trading activity across 16 venues. The initiative gives traders access to rewards, VIP tiers, and a global trading community based on their activity across Solana markets.

Season 1 focuses on perpetual futures trading through Phoenix Trade and Solflare. Traders can compete through a global leaderboard where eligible perpetual volume and profit-and-loss performance determine rankings.

The program also introduces a crate system. Every eligible dollar traded in perpetuals counts toward unlocking rewards:

Eight finalists will compete in London during the competition's final stage.

Solana Targets Fully Onchain Derivatives

The Frontier Traders launch follows a broader Solana Foundation push to expand fully onchain perpetual futures markets.

The foundation argues that many existing perps platforms rely on centralized exchanges, offchain sequencers, or hybrid architectures. It wants developers to build derivatives platforms where order submission, matching, oracle updates, cancellations, and settlement happen fully onchain.

The foundation is supporting teams building fully onchain execution systems, competitive price discovery through orderbooks, RFQ systems and other market structures, Solana-first applications, open-source trading infrastructure, and new derivatives products and trading interfaces.

Solana Still Trails Major Perps Venues

Despite its push, Solana still trails leading perpetual futures platforms in trading volume. In September, total perpetual futures volume across tracked networks reached approximately $401.86 billion, according to DefiLlama data. Solana accounted for $34.01 billion, representing about 8.4% of total volume. Hyperliquid led with $171.7 billion during the same period.

Recent developments aim to close that gap.

Velocity opened its beta to all users, supporting $wBTC, $wETH, $SOL, and $USDT as collateral. The platform is offering 2 basis point fees for a limited period. Formerly known as Drift Protocol, the platform hopes to make users affected by the April 1 exploit whole through revenue generated by its rebrand.

Imperial also opened beta access for Armada on September 20. Armada is a Solana-based proprietary perpetuals AMM that connects users to external liquidity through Imperial’s infrastructure. It supports perpetual markets across crypto, equities, commodities, foreign exchange, and pre-IPO companies.

Phoenix recently added $SOL as collateral for perpetual trading, allowing users to maintain SOL exposure while using it as margin. Previously, $SOL holders had to convert their assets into stablecoins before trading perpetuals. Phoenix’s multicollateral system allows users to deposit $SOL directly, with $SOL receiving an 80% collateral weight compared with $USDC’s 100%.

The move represents another step toward making assets on Solana more productive within its financial ecosystem.

Meanwhile, BULK, another Solana perps venue, announced that it has processed $500 million in volume on its invite-only mainnet.

The Race for Solana Perps is Accelerating

Frontier Traders puts Solana’s derivatives ambitions directly in front of traders by combining competition, incentives, and ecosystem growth.

The program arrives as Solana developers continue building new approaches to onchain perpetual markets. These efforts aim to significantly increase Solana’s share of global perps volume, depending on liquidity, user adoption, execution quality, and these platforms' ability to compete with established venues.

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