Jupiter’s Xiao-Xiao Zhu on the fat app thesis and onchain finance

What is Jupiter? What's that application? It started out as a DEX aggregator. It would basically route every user always to the best price, best execution at any given time. We did over $1.2 trillion of on-chain trading volume across spot and perps. Looking into the future, twelve months, twenty-four months, what's on your roadmap? Without going too much into details, three big blocks. One is just extending the super app on Solana. Second is the neobank, Jupiter Global, and finally- Welcome to another episode of Fifty One Insights. Today, live from Proof of Talk, one of the biggest and most important crypto conferences in the world, here in Paris, Shao Shao, President of Jupiter, one of the biggest finance super apps on Solana.

Welcome to the show. Great to be here. It's great to have you here for thirty minutes to talk all about Jupiter, why it's important for institutions, what it is, and also your journey from KKR, one of the biggest private equity firms, to a DeFi exchange, which is a very, very interesting move, and that's actually my first question. What excited you about Jupiter? How did that journey happen from KKR to the largest DeFi app on Solana? Yeah, it's definitely been a journey. So I spent most of my career in traditional finance. I was operating partner at KKR, one of the largest private investment firm in the world, where I led the digital asset strategy, where we invested behind some of the leading digital asset companies as well as investment managers in this space.

But I also did a lot of private equity buyouts, uh, in the DMT space, so had-- have, like, really that overview of, like, how to create value both on the W- Web2 side as well as on a Web3 side. And I would say what really has, uh, changed in the last couple of years is, I would say, prior to the previous, I would say, two, three years, you really had this, like, phase where, uh, most of the companies that built in crypto at scale, they couldn't actually build things at scale on blockchains, right? It's quite ironic, because we all, like, came into this space because of the promise of decentralization and distributed ledgers.

But the reality is that, like, the biggest companies in crypto are basically centralized exchanges or market makers who are extremely intransparent and are running on centralized databases, right? And it's no fault to them because, like, five, seven years ago when they started, blockchains simply were not performant enough. Ethereum was extremely expensive, right? Um, if you add a lot of volume and scale to it. And newer protocols didn't really exist back then. And this really, I, I would say, changed, you know, over the last couple of years. And really in the last two, three years, we had this inflection point where, you know, L1, L2s simply became so performant.

Uh, newer forms of, uh, blockchain really, uh, you know, solved most of the scalability issues. With the rise of Solana, right? Also, like, enabled a lot of, like, new applications, on-chain applications to really, like, build solutions at scale, right? And, and that are accessible to the, to the world, right? Not like local exchanges, but really like code-based platforms that are permissionless, self-custodial and decentralized at a global scale. And with the rise of the likes of Jupiter and Hyperliquid, you really have now a very exciting new generation of on-chain applications that really create value a very different way.

So I would say, like, in summary, you know, really saw that shift where value was initially in crypto created at the protocol level, at the blockchain level, to now really, like, in an era of fat app thesis. So it's really about the applications. What application distributions and brands can you a- and user experiences can you actually build at scale on top of blockchains, fully on blockchains, uh, to really move away from this, like, still decentralized exchange sort of paradigm to kind of a new world. And this is what, what I'm really excited about. Applications at scale.

Yeah. One of these applications is Jupiter, biggest DeFi application on Solana. Yeah. Can you just expand on that? What is Jupiter? What's that application, and what do users do- Yeah ... on that platform? Absolutely. Like, Jupiter started really, like, only three, four years ago, right? It rose with the rise of Solana, and today it represents literally the most comprehensive on-chain finance platform. It was super app on top of Solana. It started out as a DEX aggregator where, um, Jupiter used to essentially aggregate all of the volumes that were happening on hundreds of decentralized exchange venues at the same time and would basically route every user always to the best price, best execution at any given time.

But that was the initial product. Today, Jupiter has actually a suite of over twenty different on-chain products live basically in every single market that exists on Solana. In terms of the scale, the company grew a lot last year just in terms of trading volume. We're by far the number one trading venue on Solana. We did over $1.2 trillion of on-chain trading volume across spot and perps. But besides trading volume, we also are now the number one TVL protocol on Solana. So not just fast trading volume, but also like sticky capital, right? We build our Jupiter Lend answer to kind of like Aave on Ethereum.

We essentially build Jupiter Lend for the Solana ecosystem, for the blue chip assets to be lent out and borrowed against and looping, right, facilitating that. Uh, we also have JLP, the largest liquidity provider token in the Solana ecosystem. On the TVL side, we have now like over three billion dollars of, of TVL, and newer products continuously sort of bring that number up. And then, uh, I would say at the sort of more settlement layer, we also launched our own stablecoin, JUP USD, to really, like, keep the value within our ecosystem and not leak that out to third-party issuers.

And then a number of other sort of the leading prediction markets venue on Solana as well. And we just launched exciting new innovative, innovative products like on-chain poker staking, for example, or like other forms that are constantly innovating and experimenting with what other primitives that we can-- that our users really would like to do. You also launched tokenized equities recently, and I would love to dive deeper into that in a minute. But before we do that, I wanna step back and ask you, so for those listeners who don't really understand DeFi or the importance of DeFi, you have a unique perspective because-Because you were in traditional finance for years- Yeah ...

and now you're at the forefront of DeFi. Why do you think DeFi is important, and where do you see the big potential of DeFi for traditional finance? Yeah. I would say taking a step back, I think DeFi the word is maybe a little bit loaded from DeFi summer in twenty twenty, et cetera. I would say, like, we talk more about the term of on-chain finance because we believe it is more comprehensive, right? Because we believe that anything that you can almost, like, do in traditional finance, and that sort of grew over decades if not centuries, right, how traditional finance is what it is today.

But on-chain finance is essentially doing all of these kind of similar primitives, but crucial difference of that they don't happen on centralized databases and where they're controlled by centralized intermediaries. They're not transparent. You cannot audit it, right, uh, from the outside world. But really shift towards world where all of these financial applications are settled fully on-chain, right? And what that actually means, crucial difference is, you know, we believe in self-custodial technologies, right? So if it's not your keys, then it's not your money, right? Like, you shouldn't have to transfer your funds from your bank to, uh, an intermediary's bank for them-- for me to kind of like use some sort of trading application, which is essentially what happens with most centralized exchanges.

And it should really, like, we want to build a world where we provide the self-custodial on-chain technologies, and every user or institution, whether it's retail or institutions, should, you know, manage their own keys and not give those, uh, custody away to someone else. Permissionless-ness is also a very important feature or principle that we really believe in. We believe in open source, right, uh, code and that anyone around the world can participate. It's really about democratizing access to kind of financial products. And then finally, I think, like, transparency also, like, important, right? That really in this world where a lot of different builders and users and institutions can participate in the same sort of on-chain technology, having that transparency is also, like, very, very important.

And I would say, like, from a principle, this is what's sort of forming. Now, having said that, we're still, like, very, very early on that journey, right? I would say all of true on-chain finance, I think today has maybe a couple millions of unique users. A lot of them are actually on Jupiter, a lot of that is still retail. But I think if you compare that to kind of a Robinhood, which has probably thirty million monthly active users and Binance has probably like three hundred million, right? Really, it's like a ten X to a hundred X.

So growth opportunities simply from a market because most of these users interact with crypto as well, but they're just interact with crypto in a sort of, I would say, more outdated, centralized way simply because this on-chain technology wasn't ready up until like two, three years. And now you're starting to see that share of like DEXs versus CEXs, for example, continuously rising. We're probably like between twenty-five, thirty percent now already. And a lot of decentralized players are also looking at DeFi and building their own decentralized venues because they, they see where the trends are going. Younger generations also like really want to have access to kind of like their, their assets on-chain as well as maybe on more traditional brands that they still, like, trust.

I would say a big unlock, two topics that are, I would say, you know, for us is still early, but a huge unlock for on-chain finance. Uh, one is RWA and the other one I would say is just agentic finance, right? And, you know, without going too much into detail, RWA for me is just like the general trends where more and more of the real world, you would say like traditional financial assets are over time tokenized in a way. So the tokenized versions of these assets really live on-chain, right? And they can be traded, it can, you know, generate yield, you can borrow against them, and they can participate essentially in this, like, growing financial on-chain financial ecosystem.

And the more of these like high quality assets become tokenized and live on-chain, the more the overall ecosystem benefit because with higher quality assets, you will have higher quality collateral, right? You know, default rates will go down. There's like, like more reasons, not only for retail, there's more diversity of choices for retail, but then also like higher quality assets means more institutions can participate in this overall ecosystem. I would say that trend will probably permeate over the next decade or so as more and more asset classes become tokenized. We're now in the sort of stablecoin era, right?

This is the first real big use case, which is the US dollar, right? But now more and more you can see money markets, you know, treasury bills getting tokenized. Credit funds, I would say, is the next frontier. We're working very, you know, with some of the biggest partners in the world on chain equities as well. It's very exciting. But then in future, there's like many other asset classes I think that can follow soon. Now, the second big unlock for sure, I would say is agentic finance, because with the rise of agentic applications, the financial use cases of how you use AI agents, I think will only explode in future.

And as a growing share of agents help users over time make decisions in terms of capital allocation or wealth management or simply payments, right, micropayments, we believe that a big share of that will also come on-chain because essentially it's really about digital money, it's about digital transactions. And for agents, they are not designed to kind of go through human KYC, which banks and legacy TradFi players still, like, use. You require human permissions, right, to kind of like sign into a banking account. And agents by definition live, like digitally. And I think there's like a lot of innovation happening to create those rails and interconnectivity between, uh, agents and the on-chain rails to really, like, further remove frictions, right, in that sort of like transaction landscape.

And I think as more and more transactions are conducted by agents on-chain, the overall volume and TVL of the on-chain sort of world will only continue to grow. How are you preparing for that on-chain agentic future? Do you have specific products already for agents on Jupiter? Are agents already trading? We, we released a Jupiter agent kit, and it's, it's released public docs. So if you ask, uh, you know, you know, chatbot to kind of, you know, build and build some applications that connects into Jupiter APIs, agents can do that today, right? Now, of course, the overall volume of what, you know, is actually already happening, right, in terms of agentic finance is so small, but it's really, like, starting from zero, right?

Probably from only a few months ago. And then we're very excited both internally, right, our engineers, I think we have one of the strongest on-chain engineering team in all of crypto. And of course, you know, agentic finance really, like, also unlock productivity internally in terms of, you know, how many more things that we can build at what speed. But then externally, of course, as more applications come, you know, are taken over by agents, we're excited to kind of explore and build out those connectivities. And you also mentioned institutions. Institutions are definitely tiptoeing into DeFi. You mentioned money market funds that are tokenized, and they definitely also understand the vision of where this might be going, but they're still hesitant due to various reasons.

How are your conversations with these institutions? What do you hear from them? And for our executives listening, where would you paint the biggest opportunities in DeFi that they should pay attention to today? I think Jupiter, you know, really, like, we dominate, you know, retail applications. And you can say we're today kind of like a Robinhood early stage, but fully on-chain on Solana. But as sort of our overall product suite grows into all of these different markets, we also launch our on-chain neobank, for example, enabling our wallet users in-- of our wallets also use their on-chain assets to pay for everyday bills, right?

And so those kind of like, as those new connectivities between on-chain and real world are more and more sort of being, being, you know, integrated. I think there's, like, more also, like, use cases where institutions can really participate in this on-chain world that we're building. And we're, you know, essentially, we're kind of the integration layer on Solana for m- many, like, institutions already. So on the trading side, for example, some of the biggest institutions like Robinhood or Coinbase or OKX wallet or like, you know, hundreds of these kind of like big names, they're all integrated with Jupiter APIs to actually offer Solana-based SPL token trading to their users because they don't want to kind of replicate what we, uh, already built.

We route all of the volumes and the transactions on, on Solana. So that's sort of one way that we will continue to sort of grow on the institutional side. And then on the sort of TVL side, on Jupiter Lend, now we have more and more also like big inst-- crypto institutions, increasingly also like more financial institutions that have, for example, stablecoins on their, on their treasuries to participate in the lend and borrow sort of pools that we have on Jupiter Lend, right? It's, you know, with Bitwise, uh, and Matina, we just announced a big partnership where they will, you know, are deploying up to a billion dollars of TVL into the Jupiter Lend, uh, protocol.

And, you know, so with these kind of like, uh, names, more and more sort of also institutional volumes will also participate in yield generation on, you know, basically the, the largest platform on Solana. And then finally, I think on the sort of neobank side, it's a new business that we call Jupiter Global, right? On the payments, stablecoin payments side of things. I think there we're already working with the likes of Visa or Rain or like different, like, banking partners around the world to kind of offer the-- those bridges between, like, on-chain assets and real world sort of everyday financial utility.

And then I would say the fourth big area is like the big announcement we did, uh, last month with Jump and Securitize, which is really regulated on-chain equities in the US, right? Uh, twenty-four seven, but fully on-chain. So Jump will provide the liquidity. Securitize is the issuer of the basically compliant, uh, US, uh, stocks, and Jupiter provides basically the on-chain distribution, right, on Solana. So I would say these are probably the four big areas that, you know, are to be watched out. But we're very excited to not just, you know, have the retail side of things, but also institutions grow on-chain.

Yeah. That's great to hear. And speaking of tokenized equities, we saw a lot of tokenized equities announcements over the past two years. I think Robinhood was probably the first one. But there's a big difference between certain tokenized equities and others. Can you explain for our audience, what does it mean when you speak of tokenized equities, and how did you do that together with Jump and Securitize? How does it work technically? Obviously, there's, like, a lot of details. So today there are already, like, a lot of issuers that tokenize any kind of assets, including equities on the Solana network.

And as soon as anything lives in terms of token form on Solana, because we aggregate across decentralized venues, right, Jupiter, in a permissionless way, we essentially, like most of these assets are already traded and discovered on Solana. Now, I think the next evolution chapter of that is really to bring higher quality and more compliant and regulated, and that's sort of the spirit of the collaboration that we have is with Securitize and, and Jump. There will continue to be other issuers, right? But we believe in a thriving, sort of diversified, sort of ecosystem of asset issuers that tokenize assets.

And ultimately, there will be like on the marketplace that is Jupiter, right? The more choice there is, you know, the more price discrimination between different forms of assets, and both on trading and TVL. I think that will ultimately be better for the ecosystem. But we're actively working on also, like, more sort of compliant and regulated, sort of with compliant and regulated issuers and distributors, right, actively. And from a user perspective, what does that unlock tokenized equities? Is it twenty-four seven trading? Is it some kind of DeFi access and applications? What can you do now with tokenized equities?

Yeah, I think it's all of the above, right? I think if you're an US user, obviously twenty-four seven is like, um, is the unlock. But if you live in other jurisdictions, you know, simply having access to the S&P five hundred or like either S&P five hundred or like high quality US stocks, simply having global access to these is like a big, big unlock already. And of course, like participating once they are tokenized, participating in the ecosystem, creating like, you know, high quality yield is then the other sort of big use cases, right? Like the u- the composability of DeFi extended to also traditional assets that are tokenized.

And last question, Shao Shao. Looking into the future, twelve months, twenty-four months, what's on your roadmap? What are your highlights, and what are you looking at from Jupiter's perspective? Also, regulatory-wise, what's going on in the US? I think, like, without going too much into details, three big blocks. One is just extending the super app on Solana, right? Continuing to build, like, new innovations onto the super app. Second is the neobank, Jupiter Global, really bringing that, you know, into all of the world, bridging the worlds of DeFi and everyday financial utility with pay-payment use cases. And finally, it's Jupiter Net.

It's our omni-chain execution layer that we're very excited about to extend also all of our ability from Solana also to all the other chains. I think this is sort of, in a nutshell, our growth agenda going forward. Amazing. Looking forward to see that. Shao Shao, thank you very much for coming on the Fifty One Insights show, and, uh, all the best. Looking forward. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You obviously like this video enough that you got to the end. Listen, do me a favor, hit that like and subscribe button because I think you'll like it. And if you want even more, with more I mean incredible alpha, research, and digital asset market updates, subscribe to our newsletter on fifty one, that's the number five one, insights.xyz and get the most actionable insights on digital assets.

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