Why Price Discovery Will Move Onchain Within Three Years

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For most assets, price discovery comes through centralized exchanges as that’s where most traders operate. Sunrise, a Solana-focused project incubated by Wormhole Labs, wants to change that by helping users trade tokenized assets across blockchains, at scale. 

While centralized exchanges still account for the majority of trading around major crypto assets like bitcoin and ether, decentralized exchange activity on blockchains like Solana has surged in recent years. 

Sunrise launched nearly three months ago, and while it’s brought some tokens to Solana, it’s focused on a bigger mission around price discovery.

The “real flippening” will be when price discovery, the value of an asset, is determined onchain instead of on centralized exchanges as they historically have been, Saeed Badreg, CEO of Wormhole Labs, said on Token Relations’ Talking Tokens podcast. “That’s going to be a huge moment for crypto.” 

So instead of an asset going through a traditional exchange, its price will be driven by trades on decentralized platforms. This has historically been the case with memecoins, which often launch on dApps or launchpads and aren’t listed elsewhere. 

But bigger, more established assets like bitcoin or ether still mostly trade on centralized exchanges as most people still use these platforms. Still, the industry is “getting a lot closer to that world” than in previous years, Badreg said. “If you start to see price discovery happen in bitcoin onchain, it’s going to be hard to argue why I need centralized exchanges.” 

That dream might not be too far: Sunrise brought, HYPE, the token behind Hyperliquid with a market cap of $7.9 billion, to Solana in late January.  The asset is now tradable against Solana-native assets and can be moved on-and-off the blockchain. It’s one of a few assets that have been rolled out on Sunrise in recent months. 

“Sunrise came from this understanding of what is challenging asset issuers,” Badreg said. “One of the big challenges was the distribution and being able to take a native token to other blockchains, other markets, other users.” 

Badreg illustrated this by pointing to Monad’s launch of its MON token on Solana through Sunrise as an example. Within the first 72-hours, the token got 10,000 new holders on Solana, he said. “It’s one of the best ways to market outside of the community you've created.” 

Beyond tokens, Wormhole is focusing on bringing equities, commodities and other asset classes onchain.

As it stands, Sunrise currently has a market cap of $129 million, and has seen a total swap volume of $566.7 million across 123,000 wallets. Badreg expects this number to grow throughout 2026 as it onboards new tokens. 

“A lot of people have a hard time reaching Solana or penetrating this ecosystem or engaging, even though it is probably the second-biggest blockchain today,” Badreg said. “It has a tremendous amount of trading activity. If I was a project on Ethereum or on an L2, I would want to be able to reach those users and be able to do that.”

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Saeed Badreg, CEO of Wormhole Labs, about how the incubated Sunrise project helps asset issuers gain distribution and reach users across blockchains, with a particular focus on the Solana ecosystem. Saeed explains why the team built Sunrise as a turnkey solution for projects struggling to penetrate closed blockchain ecosystems, and how Wormhole's Native Token Transfer (NTT) framework enables assets to move across chains without wrapped tokens or fragmented liquidity.

He walks through the difference between wrapped and native tokens, why provenance and trust matter more than marketing terminology, and how Sunrise launched with Monad's MON token, among others, to provide day-one liquidity on Solana. The conversation covers why global institutions are accelerating crypto adoption faster than expected, how countries are modeling regulatory frameworks after the US Genius Act and pending Clarity Act, when price discovery for major assets will move onchain, and Saeed's three-part framework for evaluating teams.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 – Intro

01:49 – What Sunrise is and how it helps asset issuers with distribution

02:40 – Pain points preventing non-native tokens from creating great trading markets on other chains

03:00 – What distribution means for asset issuers across blockchain ecosystems

04:08 – Why Solana is hard to penetrate, despite being the second biggest blockchain

04:46 – How Sunrise provides turnkey solutions for reaching Solana's user base and enabling free flow of capital

06:01 – Why Wormhole cares about economic activity in crypto in aggregate

06:23 – Wrapped versus native tokens and why provenance matters more than marketing speak

07:11 – Who controls assets on different blockchains and trust in intermediaries

08:14 – How Wormhole's Native Token Transfer framework works

09:38 – Why liquidity fragmentation is the challenge for tokens bridging across chains

11:06 – Sunrise solving distribution, go-to-market, and technical challenges

12:34 – Monad's MON token as Sunrise's first major launch

14:21 – Why centralized exchanges still dominate price discovery today

16:02 – When liquidity onchain will compete with centralized venues

17:35 – How Wormhole measures success and adoption

19:43 – Regulatory environment improving and institutional adoption accelerating globally

21:58 – Countries modeling crypto regulation after the US Genius Act

24:06 – Building for volatility and focusing on 1-2 year product roadmaps

26:37 – Wormhole's technology solving real problems for customers

28:44 – Vision for assets, liquidity, and markets to move freely across ecosystems

30:52 – Expansion plans for Sunrise beyond crypto to commodities, stocks, and RWAs

33:00 – How Saeed's vision evolved since becoming CEO in 2023

34:35 – Surprising pace of global institutional adoption over the past year

36:20 – What Saeed is focused on in 2026

36:41 – Timeline for price discovery moving onchain: within three years

38:15 – Three-part framework for evaluating teams: technical soundness, go-to-market acumen, and understanding financial markets

This episode is a part of the Solana Sessions campaign that Token Relations and the Talking Tokens podcast are doing, diving into founders’ journeys and startups building on Solana. Check out the accompanying newsletter on www.token-relations.com

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