Solana's Old Guard Says the Next Chapter Is Not Memecoins

The panel that buried the punchline

Solana spent the last cycle famous for two things: surviving FTX and printing dog coins. CoinDesk reports that at Consensus Hong Kong on Feb. 12, three of the ecosystem's longer-serving builders spent their time on stage arguing that neither one defines what comes next.

The single most important thing happening right now across any blockchain is all of finance coming onchain.

Armani Ferrante, Backpack, via CoinDesk

Federa, who ran strategy at the Solana Foundation before co-founding DoubleZero, reframed the FTX era as a stress test the network passed on the only metric that compounds: "Solana lost no technical teams. It's the developers that keep building throughout these markets." Jupiter's Zhu was blunter about where loyalty actually lives — per CoinDesk, she said users do not care whether an app is built on Solana or Ethereum, only about the user experience.

The worst thing you can feel in blockchain is comfortable. If you think you've got a moat, that means someone's about to knife you in the back.

Austin Federa, DoubleZero, via CoinDesk

What it means for degens

Panels do not move charts, but they do tell you where the builders are pointing their headcount. The same identity question has been hanging over the chain since the start of the year: Cointelegraph framed 2026 as the year Solana either sheds the memecoin label through infrastructure upgrades or keeps living off speculation.

For anyone trading small caps, "finance onchain" is not an enemy narrative — it is the plumbing that decides your fills. Deeper stablecoin liquidity and more reliable blockspace make meme trading cheaper, not obsolete. Just note who is talking: when the people who build the rails stop mentioning memecoins, the fee flow they were designing around has probably already moved.