If you have shipped a program on Solana, you have already written an X1 program. X1 runs the Solana Virtual Machine on Tachyon, a client from the same lineage as Solana's Agave. The Rust is the same, the Anchor toolchain is the same, and SPL tokens and Token-2022 work the same way. Moving a deployment across mostly means pointing it at a different RPC: rpc.mainnet.x1.xyz.
Plenty of the groundwork is already done. Squads v4 multisig, Metaplex Token Metadata, Metaplex Core and Candy Machine v3 all run on X1 mainnet at exactly the program addresses they use on Solana. A Warp bridge brings over USDC, wSOL, cbBTC, ETH and, as of this week, nine tokenized stocks.
What X1 does not have yet is most of the Solana applications people use every day. That gap is the opportunity. This piece sets out what X1 offers a Solana team, which kinds of projects gain the most, and the honest risks. Every figure below was measured on 15 September 2026 against each chain's public RPC or public API.
The case in numbers
| Solana | X1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Base fee per signature | 5,000 lamports | 1,500 lamports |
| Base fee in dollars | $0.00049 | $0.00000045 |
| Rent for one new token account | $0.14 | $0.0006 |
| Token accounts for a 10,000-wallet airdrop | ≈ $1,450 | ≈ $6 |
| Rent for a 500 KB program account | 2.54 SOL ≈ $247 | 3.48 XNT ≈ $1.04 |
| Non-vote transactions per second (last hour) | 2,435 | 5.3 |
| DeFi TVL tracked by DeFiLlama | $5.76 billion | not tracked |
Prices used: SOL $97.20, XNT $0.2976. X1 actually charges more lamports than Solana for rent. The dollar costs are lower because XNT costs a fraction of what SOL does. The base fee is lower in both lamports and dollars: a basic transfer costs about a thousand times less on X1.
The last two rows cut both ways, and they are the heart of this article. X1's blockspace is nearly empty and its DeFi is small enough that the largest tracker doesn't list it yet. For a project that wants a crowd, that is a weakness. For a project that wants to be the first name in its category, it is the whole point.
What X1 gives a Solana team
Same SVM, same code. Nothing needs rewriting. Accounts, programs, PDAs, compute budgets and the Token-2022 extensions all behave as they do on Solana. Wallets carry over too. A Phantom or Backpack seed phrase imports straight into X1 Wallet, and Backpack connects to X1 through a custom RPC. Our wallet setup guide walks through both.
It costs almost nothing to try. Deploying a large program costs about a dollar in rent. Opening token accounts for ten thousand users costs about six dollars. Transaction fees round to zero. On Solana a failed experiment costs real money. On X1 the main cost is your team's time.
Open blockspace. X1 carried about 454,000 non-vote transactions in the last day, against more than 200 million on Solana. A new application would not compete with memecoin traffic for block space, and its activity would be easy to see on-chain. X1 also made validator votes free and uses dynamic base fees, which are designed to keep blocks from filling up.
The assets are already here. You don't have to bootstrap collateral from scratch. The Warp bridge carries wSOL, cbBTC and ETH, USDC and the nine xStocks that went live this week. Solana community tokens such as Degen (DGN) and SolXenCat (xencat) already cross it as well.
A cheap gas token and a community waiting for apps. At $0.2976, one dollar of XNT covers thousands of transactions, so onboarding a new user costs nearly nothing. XNT's market cap is $4.20 million on its circulating supply, while its fully diluted value is $319.5 million, so most of the supply is not yet circulating. Holders who already have XNT, stake it and trade on XDEX have far fewer places to use it than a Solana user does. A useful app gets noticed quickly in an ecosystem this size.
New ground. On Solana, a new lending market launches into a field of established incumbents. On X1 it would be the first. Being first to ship is the rare advantage that goes away the moment someone else takes it.
The Solana projects X1 is missing
We checked the mainnet program addresses of major Solana protocols against X1. Apart from the Squads and Metaplex programs above, none of them is deployed at its Solana address. X1's own ecosystem fills some of the same categories with native projects, which we note where relevant. Here is where a Solana team would find the most open ground.
1. Oracles: Pyth and Switchboard
This is the missing piece everything else depends on. X1 has a community-run token price oracle for on-chain tokens, but no established feed network for external prices such as equities, BTC and ETH. The cost is already visible: X1's prediction market Vero is paused until its oracle is rebuilt. Lending, perps and anything built on the new xStocks all need trusted prices first. Pyth's code is Apache-2.0 licensed, so either team could bring its receiver programs across and immediately become the price layer for a whole chain.
2. Lending: Kamino, marginfi and Save
X1 has bridged USDC, BTC, ETH, SOL and now equities like NVIDIA and Meta, and nowhere to borrow against any of them. Our ecosystem directory lists no lending market. Holders of NVDA.X or cbBTC on X1 today can only hold or sell. The first money market would set the collateral rules for the chain.
Licensing makes the pitch sharper. Kamino's lending program is under the Business Source License, so it can't simply be copied; X1 gets Kamino only if the Kamino team deploys it. marginfi and Save (formerly Solend) are Apache-2.0, which means anyone could fork them. Those teams have a reason to arrive before a copy does.
3. Concentrated liquidity: Orca, Meteora and Raydium
XDEX, X1's main exchange, is a constant-product AMM, and all its listed pools together hold under $100,000. That is exactly the environment where concentrated liquidity helps most. Our xStocks coverage showed a Tesla pool holding a few hundred dollars and quoting a price far from Nasdaq's. A Whirlpool or a DLMM pool can offer usable depth near the market price with a fraction of that capital.
Orca's code has been under its own Orca License since 27 February 2025, and Meteora's licence is noncommercial, so both would need their own teams to deploy. Raydium's CLMM is Apache-2.0 and open to anyone, and on X1 the team that ships it first gets its pick of the pairs.
4. Order books: Phoenix
Tokenized stocks trade around the clock on X1 while US exchanges are closed. An on-chain order book is the natural place to discover weekend prices, and X1 has none. Phoenix is MIT-licensed, fast, and matches trades without a separate crank. It would give market makers on X1 a proper venue from day one.
5. Token operations: Streamflow and Realms
X1 already has a busy launch scene. The Degen launchpad lists more than 70 projects, and X1 Labs has its own investor vesting to manage. There is no Streamflow for vesting, locks and payroll, and no Realms for DAO governance. Squads is already in place for treasuries. Adding vesting and governance would complete the kit every new token team needs, and those tools are paid in fees on every stream and proposal.
6. Games and consumer apps: MagicBlock
X1 has a growing on-chain games scene, with titles like on-chain chess and Tetris already live. Games are the workload that benefits most from near-zero fees, because every move is a transaction. MagicBlock's ephemeral rollups would let those games scale to real-time play while settling on a base layer where a thousand moves cost well under a cent.
7. Perpetual futures: Jupiter Perps and Flash Trade
Perps are among the busiest programs on Solana. When we checked, Jupiter Perps processed 100 transactions in under two and a half minutes, and Flash Trade was active too. X1 has no perps venue at all. None of Solana's perps programs is deployed on X1, and our ecosystem directory lists none. X1 Labs has talked about adding perps, but nothing is live today.
The ingredients are already on X1. The Warp bridge carries cbBTC, ETH, wSOL and USDC, the collateral and markets every perps venue starts with, plus nine tokenized stocks. Stock perps would keep trading through weekends when Nasdaq is closed, the same opening we describe for order books above.
Perps also suit cheap blockspace. Every liquidation, funding update, keeper action and oracle price push is a transaction. On X1 each of those costs a fraction of a cent, so a venue can update more often and still liquidate small positions profitably. A perps venue needs the oracle layer from the first section, which makes an oracle team and a perps team natural partners on X1.
8. Memecoin communities
Not every Solana project is a protocol. Community tokens are already moving over. Degen launches on both Solana and X1, and its DGN token plus SolXenCat's xencat are routed through the Warp bridge. For a community that feels lost in the flood of new tokens launching on Solana, an X1 pool and an XDEX listing are a cheap way to reach a new audience with little competition for attention.
The honest risks
An article that leaves these out would be selling, not reporting.
- Liquidity is thin. Under $100,000 across XDEX's listed pools. Any DeFi launch has to bring or incentivise its own depth.
- The user base is small. Five non-vote transactions a second is room to grow, but it is also the current size of the audience.
- The bridge is a trust assumption. Warp is secured by guardians: five of seven must sign each transfer. Assets you build on inherit that model.
- Infrastructure is still arriving. Oracles are the obvious gap. X1 isn't tracked by DeFiLlama yet, and wallet support outside X1 Wallet is partial: Backpack shows XNT as SOL.
- XNT is volatile. Cheap fees depend on a cheap token. The fee schedule in lamports is protocol-level, but the dollar cost will rise if XNT does.
None of these risks is hidden, and several of them are exactly the gaps a Solana team could fill.
The pitch, in one line
For about a dollar in rent, a Solana team can put the program it has already audited onto a chain where its category is empty, its users' fees round to zero, and the collateral is already bridged. The downside is a small, early market. The upside is being the name X1 users think of when they need a lending market, an oracle, a perps venue, a concentrated liquidity DEX or an order book. On Solana, that kind of first-mover position went years ago. On X1, it is still open.
Disclosure: X1 Report is run by an X1 node operator who holds XNT. See our editorial standards. None of the projects named here has announced plans to deploy on X1, and inclusion is not a claim that they will.