The Solana Foundation launched a new institutional program called Frontier Traders on Thursday afternoon. It targets elite trading firms with high volume. The first qualifying campaign will open on Friday with SpaceX tokenized equity.
The entry requirement is steep. Firms need at least $500 million in trailing 30-day onchain DEX volume. They also need $16 million in gross time-weighted open interest. The program has three VIP tiers. VIP 1 is for volume between $500 million and $2 billion. VIP 2 covers $2 billion to $5 billion. VIP 3 is for $5 billion and above. Maker minimums are handled directly with firms that offer competitive liquidity. Members get trading rebates across all Solana venues. They also receive priority RPC access, early access to asset launches via Asset Express, and invitations to quarterly closed-door briefings. Jupiter Exchange is the featured venue partner. VIP enrollment closes on June 18.
Firms below the volume threshold can still join through time-limited campaigns. The first campaign opens on SpaceX tokenized equity this Friday. Choosing SpaceX as the first asset puts Solana right into the pre-IPO derivatives competition. Trade.xyz launched a synthetic SpaceX perpetual on Hyperliquid in May. Bybit and Kraken followed in June with 1:1 equity-backed SpaceX exposure via Backed Assets’ xStocks. This brought the active venue count to four before Thursday’s announcement.
Fee Comparison and Volume Claims
The Frontier Traders website shows fee comparisons. It says all-in fees are 0.4 basis points on SOL/USDC compared to 2.6 basis points for Binance VIP 9. That is a 6.5 times gap. The Foundation uses this to argue for routing institutional volume to Solana. The site also cites BisonFi Prop AMM generating over $6 billion in trailing 30-day onchain volume. That is nearly three times Binance’s figure for the same period.
Competitive Context
The program arrives as Solana pushes from different angles against Hyperliquid’s institutional perp market share. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko backed a new perp DEX last month. It aims to pull volume back to Solana. Frontier Traders adds direct financial rewards on top of that. Firms in the program collect rebates from the Foundation for trading onchain. They also get structured access to the protocols that shape Solana’s market structure.
