> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.imperial.space/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.imperial.space/intro/overview.md).

# Overview

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The path of victory for Solana has always been on-chain NASDAQ. Solana was built, through painstaking engineering, to power the world’s financial markets. At the time, crypto liquidity was fractured across the various ETH L2s and BTC/ETH. Solana, with the right mix of building a better machine and its focus on developers has created an L1 where most spot volumes flow today. Companies like Backpack and Sunrise are bringing stock tokens fully on-chain, PumpFun tokens live natively on Solana and the router/spot propAMM ecosystem is rich.

While spot trading is very important for Solana to be NASDAQ on-chain, it cannot achieve its full potential without also winning perps markets. Today, [Coinglass](https://www.coinglass.com/currencies/BTC/spot) reports BTC futures trade at 14x the volume spot trades. Options markets drive price action in spot markets, not the other way around.

**If Solana wants to be NASDAQ on-chain, perps trades must live on Solana’s global ledger.**

This is Imperial. Imperial takes the depth of the deepest books in DeFi and quotes it natively on Solana. A trade on Armada fills against that depth, settles on Solana's ledger, and costs 1 bp in taker fees at the tightest spreads on the chain.