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Solana’s memecoin season mostly played out on DEXs like Raydium and Jupiter, with centralized exchanges, which sometimes only get around to listing new tokens after their popularity has peaked, sitting the party out.
Hard to blame them at the time. Liquidity was scattered, tokens were often unserious and (in earlier political climates) listings seemed sure to attract unwanted scrutiny from the big-bads at the SEC.
But the world has changed, there’s money to be made, and strategies are now in flux.
Last week, centralized exchange Bybit announced a new Solana-based exchange called Byreal. According to the company, it’s being built from scratch and incubated in-house. Today, the project’s socials went live with the announcement of a testnet, set for June 30, and a mainnet slated for Q3 this year.
According to the announcement, Byreal will offer a “hybrid” model meant to merge centralized liquidity with decentralized execution.
Pitched as an extension of Bybit itself, it will route trades using Request for Quote (RFQ) and Concentrated Liquidity (CLMM) mechanisms, integrate MEV protection and leverage unified liquidity sources. Users get execution from market makers or LPs, depending on the asset and conditions.
There’s also Revive Vault, a curated yield product designed to deliver real yield on Solana assets like bbSOL, and its own token launchpad, called Reset Launch.
The latter seeks to create a more equitable token distribution by combining a Smart Price Ladder that raises token prices incrementally with a Fairshare Engine that distributes allocations based on participation rather than speed.
And that’s all well and good, but in a world already full to bursting with competing DEXs, why does Bybit think Solana needs another one?
Well, despite DeFi’s promise of open, onchain finance, most trading still happens on centralized exchanges. That’s partly due to liquidity fragmentation, partly due to painful UX, and mostly because DEXs still can’t compete with CEXs on slippage, speed or price execution.
With its fast finality and low fees, Solana is uniquely positioned to bridge that gap. But its most popular DEXs tend to specialize: Phoenix offers pure order books, Jupiter routes swaps and Raydium hosts memecoin liquidity.
Then there’s the growing trading juggernaut in Hyperliquid — which uses colocated validators to hit CEX-like performance in a no-KYC DEX environment. It’s obviously a different blockchain with some centralization tradeoffs, but Solana, DEXs, and CEXs could all have a lot to lose if Hyperliquid becomes the retail crypto trading platform of choice.
The Solana market-proper lacks a DEX that combines deep liquidity, fair price discovery and streamlined onboarding into a single package, though.
So that’s the play for Byreal: balance CEX-grade execution, DeFi transparency and user experience while unifying liquidity into a single trading venue. If it can ship fast and attract real projects, Bybit probably won’t be the only CEX to script a second act beyond CeFi.
