Flash Trade founder says Solana wanted one perps winner as protocol shuts down

Flash Trade founder Anas Khader says perceived favoritism from the Solana Foundation contributed to his decision to shut down the exchange, one of Solana's larger perps venues with more than $21 billion in cumulative trading volume, claiming the network wanted to back only a single winner in the sector.

• Flash Trade said in a Friday post on X that it plans to wind down unless it finds a buyer for its technology, brand and intellectual property.
• According to data from DefiLlama, Flash Trade is the fifth largest perps crypto DEX on Solana by monthly volume, boasting more than $250 million over the past 30 days.

In a separate X post on Friday, Aug. 7, Khader took responsibility for the failure and pointed to three factors behind the decision, including disagreements within the team, financial and personal exhaustion, and what he described as the Solana Foundation's treatment of competing perps protocols.

Khader went further, saying he had learned about a plan to heavily support the unnamed team ahead of Solana's Breakpoint conference because "Solana needs one winner."

But Khader explicitly said he wasn't blaming the Foundation for Flash Trade's closure and described his reaction to the perceived favoritism as emotional.

Phoenix had already become the center of a favoritism fight

While Khader didn't identify the team he believes the Foundation was favoring, his comments come months after Phoenix, another Solana perpetual futures exchange, became the center of a public fight over perceived favoritism from prominent figures in the ecosystem.

In May, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and other ecosystem figures publicly and endlessly promoted Phoenix, sparking complaints from rival Solana builders that the project was getting outsized attention.

• Flash Trade's own documentation describes orders as being matched against liquidity pools at prices supplied by decentralized oracles.
• Phoenix, by contrast, was launched by Ellipsis Labs as an on-chain perpetual futures venue built around the firm's experience operating fully on-chain markets on Solana.

That distinction became even more important in June, when the Solana Foundation called for teams building perps and said it would provide "distribution, technical assistance, and above all, capital" to projects that fit its preferred design.

Its criteria specifically favored fully on-chain execution where orders, oracle updates, matches, cancellations and settlements happen on the network.

The Foundation also said it preferred markets where prices emerge from competing participants, including order books and request-for-quote systems, rather than models where pricing is based on pools or deposits.

And those criteria resemble Phoenix's design more closely than Flash Trade's original pool-to-peer, oracle-priced model.

Yakovenko was already an investor in the company behind Phoenix

There's also another thing worth noting. Yakovenko personally invested in Ellipsis Labs, the company behind Phoenix, years before the current perps competition emerged.

• Ellipsis Labs disclosed Yakovenko as an angel investor in its $3.3 million seed round in 2023, which it said would help accelerate products, including Phoenix.
• He remained an investor when Ellipsis raised another $21 million in 2024 alongside Haun Ventures, Electric Capital and Paradigm.
• Yakovenko's investment was personal, though, and doesn't show that the Solana Foundation financed Phoenix or coordinated its promotion.
• There's no public disclosure that Yakovenko personally invested in Flash Trade as the protocol says on its FAQ page it was built with "zero external funding" and without venture capital.

Flash Trade had also received Solana exposure

Flash Trade wasn't entirely shut out of Solana-backed distribution.

As recently as June 16, Solana Media, a podcast hub hosted on Solana's official website, published a nearly hour-long interview with Khader titled Flash Trade Is Reinventing Perps on Solana.

• The Lightspeed, a Blockworks show focused heavily on Solana and its ecosystem, podcast carrying the interview was kickstarted by a Solana Foundation grant.

And on July 23, another Solana Media podcast hosted Khader following a roughly $100,000 exploit affecting Flash Trade.

Khader said in the recent X post that the exploit itself "is what really broke something in me."

Although Flash Trade recovered quickly and the broader system was hardened afterward, Khader said the incident left him increasingly "paranoid" about security and trying to personally review more of the team's work.