Solana's DeFi Super App: The Jupiter End Game | Kash Dhanda
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: Solana’s DeFi Super App: The Jupiter End Game | Kash Dhanda
This episode features Kash Dhanda, who recently transitioned from SuperTeam to Jupiter, discussing the ambitious “DeFi Super App” vision for Jupiter on the Solana blockchain, driven by aggressive acquisitions and product expansion.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is on Solana’s DeFi ecosystem, specifically Jupiter’s strategic pivot from being primarily a leading DEX aggregator to becoming a comprehensive DeFi Super App. Key themes include product verticalization, strategic acquisitions, the economics of DeFi services (like Perps trading), and the global nature of crypto adoption.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Meta-Aggregation Strategy: Jupiter is expanding its aggregation capabilities beyond just AMMs to include other liquidity sources like D-Flow and Hashflow via its Jupiter Z (RFQ) offering, increasing routing complexity and efficiency.
- Perps AMM Model: Jupiter’s Perpetual Trading product, the second largest in crypto, utilizes an AMM model rather than a traditional order book, which is crucial for its liquidity provider token (JLP) economics.
- Ultra Mode V2 Features: Upcoming updates to the high-efficiency swap mode (Ultra Mode) will include an AI self-learning algorithm to optimize swaps and potentially offer gasless execution for users without SOL.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Revenue Driver Shift: Contrary to popular perception that Jupiter is solely an aggregator, Perpetuals trading currently drives the majority of Jupiter’s revenue, surprising many users who primarily use the free swap function.
- Pragmatism Over Ideology: The industry is shifting toward pragmatism, where long-term businesses with clear token utility and revenue models (like Jupiter’s fee structure) are gaining favor over purely ideological or speculative token launches.
- Professionalization of Investment: Large capital allocators (liquid funds, family offices) are increasingly demanding metrics like “earnings per token” and seeking real businesses attached to tokens, signaling a maturation of the market.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Jupiter: The central focus, aiming to be the single interface for all Solana activities (on-ramping, trading, portfolio management, NFTs).
- Acquired Teams (e.g., Drip House, SonarWatch): Jupiter acquires exceptional founders and teams to rapidly fill expertise gaps (e.g., Drip House for NFTs, SonarWatch for portfolio management).
- Hyperliquid: Mentioned as the primary competitor to Jupiter’s Perps product, highlighting the high-speed derivatives market.
- Ledger: Mentioned as a sponsor, emphasizing hardware security for Solana assets, including support for staking and managing SPL tokens.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion touched upon the East vs. West divide, noting that centralized exchanges (CEXs) are overwhelmingly Asian-based (Binance, Bybit, OKX), controlling the majority of global trading volume. However, DeFi is seen as a global unifier because its decentralized nature bypasses many of the regional regulatory concerns that affect CEXs. Solana’s vision aims for “pure information equality” globally.
6. Future Implications
Jupiter is aggressively pursuing a vertical integration strategy akin to mature industry leaders (Amazon, Uber) to capture user convenience and loyalty. This means Jupiter will continuously add new, non-trading functionalities quarterly, evolving from a swap aggregator into an all-encompassing platform for the Solana ecosystem, potentially expanding into areas like Web3 social or payments.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Solana ecosystem participants, DeFi product builders, crypto investors, and venture capitalists interested in platform strategy, scaling infrastructure, and the future architecture of decentralized applications.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"I think of it like the old school, I'm an old man. I think of it in like the Microsoft way. What did Bill Gates say a platform is? You are a platform where by definition the people building on top of you make more money than you do."
"The question is, is there a world where Solana's apps become parasitic to Solana the network in the same way that L2s are parasitic to ETH? Especially when you see a trend of a lot more activity happening off-chain."
"On Ethereum, the ETH token has performed horribly for a long time largely because the L2 scaling roadmap I think was a huge mistake. And these L2s are parasitic to Ethereum. There's no good way to actually meaningfully create revenue back to the L1 because it all goes to these single sequencers and L2s."
"Solana app revenue is the highest in crypto. It actually has been growing, I believe, more proportionally more quickly than REV [Validator Revenue]."
"It is actually one of the most underappreciated things that Jupiter did for the ecosystem is in other ecosystems where the AMMs themselves have all the brand recognition... But in Solana, because Jupiter was able to aggregate all the liquidity, it allows the best tech to win."
"The AMM model is really important in particular for long-tail assets. In order to onboard a market maker, there's days to weeks of negotiations... Market makers will always be incentivized towards the fat end of the power-law distribution. So I think AMMs will always be useful for the long-tail."