The Solana Foundation published a new Request for Startups on 9 November 2026. It lists eleven ideas for companies to build on Solana, each put forward by a named person. They run from a perpetual futures market on city house prices to an AI financial advisor that lives inside a crypto wallet. Builders who take one on are pointed to the Solana Builder Program, which the Request for Startups page says offers "grants, go-to-market support, builder tools, hiring help, and credits."
The @solana announcement framed the list as one question put to "people shaping the ecosystem": what would you build now? The page adds that a build challenge "is coming next."
The 11 Solana startup ideas and who proposed them
Each of the eleven requests comes with a category, a named speaker and a short video, a thesis, a "why now", a "why Solana" and three starting points. Four of the eleven speakers work at the Solana Foundation. The other seven are founders, investors and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who appears on the page simply as Toly.
The outside names include Matty Taylor, founder of Colosseum, Robert Chen, founder of the security firm OtterSec, Y Combinator visiting partner Nemil Dalal, and Kyle Samani, listed as chairman of Forward Industries. The full list, with titles as the page prints them:
| Request | Category | Proposed by |
|---|---|---|
| Onchain housing futures | Markets | Matty Taylor, Founder, Colosseum |
| An open marketplace for AI inference | AI | Jacob Creech, VP Technology, Solana Foundation |
| Entertainment finance for everyone | Consumer | Pedro Miranda, Head of Consumer, Solana Foundation |
| Security for the agentic age | Security | Robert Chen, Founder, OtterSec |
| Bring exotic collectibles onchain | Tokenization | Vibhu Norby, CPO, Solana Foundation |
| Attention tokens for startup distribution | Distribution | Farhaj Mayan, Founder, Forma |
| Perps and onchain trading | Markets | Toly (no title listed) |
| An AI financial advisor in your wallet | AI | Rishin Sharma, Head of AI, Solana Foundation |
| Build the future of stablecoins | Payments | Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner, Y Combinator |
| Discovery and trading for onchain startup fundraising | Markets | Adam Bergeman, Founder, Star.fun |
| Game-day mode for prediction markets | Consumer | Kyle Samani, Chairman, Forward Industries |
Some of the requests are concrete products. Taylor's housing market would let a homeowner hedge against a fall in local prices while someone saving for a first home takes exposure to the same index, starting with one city and licensed price data. Samani's request is a single live screen showing a football fan's open prediction-market positions across several games, built on top of existing trading and settlement layers. Farhaj Mayan proposes a token tied to a startup's attention rather than its equity, with trading revenue flowing into a wallet that can only pay for marketing.
Others are deliberately open. Toly's request asks builders to grow Solana's share of perpetual futures trading (perps, derivatives contracts with no expiry date) and to keep expanding into other markets, with one starting point that reads like a scorecard: "measure repeat usage and market share over time." Chen's security brief asks for continuous transaction monitoring, onchain firewalls and tools to trace stolen funds, on the grounds that attackers are gaining new capabilities from AI.
Vibhu Norby, the Foundation's chief product officer, added his own pitch for the collectibles request in a post on X shortly after the launch, calling collectibles a small market next to equities but an easy way to bring people into crypto:
His page brief extends the tokenized-collectibles model (an authenticated item in a vault, a token for ownership and a way to redeem the physical object) to art, cars, coins, antiques and watches.
Solana Builder Program grants and the coming build challenge
The Solana Builder Program is the support route attached to the list. Builders apply through a linked form for grants, go-to-market support, builder tools, hiring help and credits, and the text version of the Request for Startups tells them to apply "once there is something to show." Grant sizes, eligibility rules and deadlines are not published on the page, and the build challenge has no dates, prize pool or rules yet.
A Request for Startups written for AI coding agents
The Foundation wrote the page for AI coding agents as well as people. Next to "Humans: explore the requests" sits a button reading "Agents: choose what to build", which opens a markdown guide addressed to an agent helping a builder. It tells the agent to ask one question at a time (who the first user is, what could ship in two weeks, which licences or compliance constraints could block it) and, if the builder is undecided, to "recommend the one with the clearest first user and smallest testable wedge." It also tells agents not to present a product as "legally compliant, custody-safe, or investment-ready without appropriate expert review." Each request then maps to Solana developer documentation, from Token-2022 extensions to x402 agent payments and the LiteSVM and Surfpool testing tools.
How the 2026 list differs from the Foundation's 2024 Request for Startups
The Foundation has published a wish-list before. An earlier Request for Startups, marked "Last updated August 2024", is still online. It reads as a set of unsigned essays by sector: energy DePIN (networks that pay token rewards for running physical hardware), subscriptions paid out of staking yield, creator tokens, fully onchain games, onchain identity and a lighter RPC node.
Our reading of the two pages side by side: DePIN, games and identity are gone, and trading has moved to the centre. Three of the 2026 requests sit under Markets and a fourth, Samani's prediction-market screen, is filed under Consumer. Stablecoins, AI and security each get a named owner, and every idea now comes with a speaker and a video.
Several requests point at products that are already shipping on Solana. Toly's market-share goal picks up a race we have followed since Solana's perps venues passed a cumulative-volume milestone in August, and Samani's game-day screen targets the same sports fans as the Polymarket-powered parlays Jupiter Predict added on 6 November. Norby's equities comparison lands four days after Jito's JTX opened tokenized stock trading, and Chen's monitoring brief follows Helius releasing Watchtower, a free open-source security monitor for Solana programs, on 6 November.
The Foundation's own "Why Solana" lines are specific to each idea: low transaction costs and global transfers for stablecoin payments, observable onchain transactions for security monitoring, and shared trading infrastructure for collectibles. The next things to watch are the build challenge's details and the first teams that ship against a request.
