Phoenix expands to 100-plus perpetual markets on Solana

Phoenix has expanded its Solana-based perpetual futures platform to more than 100 markets, according to Kabeer, its head of business development. “Cumulative trading volume had exceeded $5 billion,” he said during a November 11 discussion on Decrypt’s X account.

Foreign exchange trading launched the previous day, while the live product set covers major equities and crypto tokens. Phoenix also plans to let traders post tokenized stock holdings as collateral for additional positions.

The $5 billion measures cumulative trading volume, not customer deposits, revenue or open interest. Phoenix did not specify the measurement period or disclose those other balances.

Fully on-chain market structure

Kabeer described Phoenix’s order book as fully on-chain. “Trades, order cancellations and market-maker order updates all take place on Solana,” he said. He credited improvements in Solana’s performance with making it possible to operate a service whose processing requirements the team previously would have found difficult to support entirely on-chain.

Phoenix launched its mainnet earlier this year and stepped up user onboarding near the end of March. Kabeer acknowledged that summer marketing aimed at larger competitors ran ahead of product development, separating the platform’s distribution push from the pace of its technical build.

The platform has attracted tens of thousands of users, including thousands active daily. Market makers supply liquidity across equities, foreign exchange and crypto. Most of the team previously worked as quantitative traders, and it spent about four years building on Solana.

Before Phoenix, the team operated a proprietary automated market maker that handled approximately $400 billion in spot trading volume. On a simple comparison, that total is at least 80 times the $5 billion lower bound Phoenix reported, although the measures cover different systems and periods. Kabeer said the team is applying that market-making experience to expand perpetual futures.

Round-the-clock access and positioning

Phoenix’s round-the-clock market lets participants respond to news before traditional markets open and during weekends. Kabeer illustrated the workflow by shorting Nvidia after news broke, closing the position after a price decline and then switching to a long position.

He said the AI narrative might be approaching a peak but remained bullish on Nvidia because of potential growth in robotics and related demand. His view on Anthropic was opposite: he maintained a short position because he considered it among the most overvalued private companies.

Kabeer argued that Chinese open-source AI models deliver about 95% of leading models’ performance at 1% to 2% of the cost. He said this puts pressure on token costs and AI-company valuations. He planned to maintain the Anthropic short until an IPO while keeping leverage restrained because of short-term volatility.

Widespread liquidations over the preceding few weeks sharply reduced open interest. Kabeer said larger traders were holding existing positions while assessing the US midterms, changes in the administration, and the effects of data-center and AI-infrastructure expansion on crypto markets.

What does tokenized equity collateral change for traders?

Collateral expansion is a central focus of Phoenix’s roadmap. At Breakpoint, Kabeer previewed announcements that Phoenix would soon support tokenized equity holdings as collateral. The feature would let traders retain their spot assets while taking short-term directional positions without selling those holdings.

He also said support for additional collateral assets could enable basis trades, which exploit price differences between spot and futures markets. For practitioners, the practical change is capital efficiency: eligible holdings could secure new exposure without a sale of the underlying asset. The associated risk also changes because traders would hold both the spot position and the derivative exposure.

Timing remains the constraint: Kabeer gave no launch date for tokenized equity collateral and described the feature as forthcoming. If Phoenix delivers it, the market structure shifts toward tokenized securities serving directly as collateral for perpetual-futures exposure. That is the next operational milestone for traders deciding whether the roadmap has become usable market infrastructure.