Phoenix launches $420,000 Flight Club after topping $1 billion Solana perps volume

Phoenix launched Flight Club on July 27, a day after saying it surpassed $1 billion in cumulative Solana perpetuals volume without token incentives, and then moved above $10 million in open interest for the first time, with reports putting the peak around $11 million versus a prior June record of $8.8 million. The 28-day program distributes $420,000 in USDC based on trading volume, open interest, referral volume and streak bonuses, while a separate Solana Foundation Frontier Traders campaign administered by Torque offers a $25,000 prize pool for Phoenix equity perps traders. Phoenix followed the incentive launch on July 28 by listing five new 10x equity perpetuals — Cerebras Systems (CBRS), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Qualcomm (QCOM), Arm Holdings (ARM) and ASML Holding (ASML). DeFiLlama data cited in the latest update showed cumulative perpetual volume around $917 million, with roughly $163 million in 30-day volume and about $67 million in 24-hour volume, even as Phoenix has separately highlighted the $1 billion cumulative unincentivized volume milestone. The exchange, built on Solana by Ellipsis Labs, pitches a fully on-chain 'crankless' order book designed to remove external order-processing intermediaries, enabling gasless trading and fees of roughly 0.005%. The open-interest jump comes as Phoenix competes in a crowded Solana perps market that includes Jupiter, Drift Protocol and Zeta Markets, while broader on-chain derivatives benchmarks such as Hyperliquid operate at far larger scale. The next question for traders is whether activity holds once Flight Club’s 28-day rewards period ends.