Solana-based Phoenix expands to more than 100 perpetual futures markets, including stocks and FX

Phoenix, a Solana-based perpetual futures platform, has expanded beyond cryptocurrencies into equities and foreign exchange, with more than 100 markets available. It also plans to let traders use tokenized stock holdings as collateral for additional trades.

In a discussion on Decrypt’s X account on November 11, Kabeer, Phoenix’s head of business development, said cumulative trading volume had exceeded $5 billion. The platform covers major equities and crypto tokens and had launched foreign exchange trading the previous day, he said.

Kabeer described Phoenix’s fully on-chain order book as a central feature: trades, order cancellations and market-maker order updates all take place on Solana. He said improvements in the blockchain’s performance had made it possible to operate a service whose processing requirements would previously have been difficult to support entirely on-chain.

After launching its mainnet earlier this year, Phoenix began stepping up user onboarding toward the end of March, he said. He acknowledged that summer marketing aimed at larger competitors had moved ahead of product development. The platform has attracted tens of thousands of users, with thousands active daily, and market makers supply liquidity across equities, foreign exchange and crypto, he added.

The team consists mostly of former quantitative traders and has spent about four years building on Solana, according to Kabeer. Before developing Phoenix, it operated a proprietary automated market maker that handled approximately $400 billion in spot trading volume. The team is now drawing on that experience to expand its perpetual futures business, he said.

Kabeer said round-the-clock trading allows participants to respond to news before traditional markets open and over weekends. As an example, he described shorting Nvidia after news broke, closing the position following a price decline and then switching to a long position. Although he said the AI narrative might be approaching a peak, he remained bullish on Nvidia because of potential growth in robotics and related demand.

He held a different view on Anthropic, saying he maintained a short position because he considered it among the most overvalued private companies. Kabeer argued that Chinese open-source AI models were delivering about 95% of leading models’ performance at 1% to 2% of the cost, putting pressure on token costs and leading AI companies’ valuations. He said he intended to maintain that position until an IPO, while keeping leverage restrained because of short-term volatility.

On broader market conditions, Kabeer said widespread liquidations over the preceding few weeks had sharply reduced open interest. Larger traders were holding existing positions while assessing uncertainty around the US midterms, changes in the administration and the effects of data-center and AI infrastructure expansion on crypto markets, he said.

Collateral support is a focus of Phoenix’s planned expansion. Previewing announcements at Breakpoint, Kabeer said support for additional collateral assets could enable basis trades that exploit price differences between spot and futures markets. He said Phoenix would soon let users put tokenized equity holdings to work as collateral, allowing them to retain their spot assets while taking short-term directional positions without selling those holdings.