Major regulatory wins for Kraken and Ripple, Hyperliquid expands derivatives offerings with HIP-3 deployments, S&P Global acquires OpenZeppelin, and Akash Network migrates to Solana.
DeFi & Yields ·
Akash Network announced it will migrate its marketplace from its Cosmos-based sovereign chain to Solana mainnet, converting AKT to a native SPL token and rebuilding core functions as Solana programs. The core team cited four rationales: eliminating costs of maintaining a chain with minimal sovereign utility, accessing near-zero transaction fees for the roughly 15,000 daily marketplace transactions, joining an existing cluster of DePIN projects already settling on Solana, and gaining exposure to Solana's liquidity and user base. AKT will migrate first, launching two weeks after a governance vote passes and audits clear, with a two-year migration window. The marketplace cutover will follow once additional audits and rehearsals complete, during which live workloads continue for 90 days as tenants redeploy.
The migration trades away Akash's own consensus layer, validator income, native Interchain Communication, and the "own chain" narrative. The core team noted that the marketplace requires no custom transaction handling or per-block settlement functions that would justify a sovereign chain, and that capital currently bonded to validators could instead fund provider incentives and growth. Akash will inherit Solana's security without running its own validator set or maintaining forks of the Cosmos SDK and related libraries, reducing ongoing engineering burden.
No cutover date has been set; governance must still vote on both the migration proposal and a subsequent sunset upgrade before any transition begins. Tenants retain existing SDL files and live leases, while providers need only upgrade one daemon and re-register on Solana.