Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
“We did over $1.2 trillion of onchain trading volume across spot and perps.”
One app on Solana processed $1.2 trillion in trading volume. Not an exchange with servers and order books. An app that runs entirely on a blockchain. Its president spent years at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, before he switched sides.
His name is Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu, President of Jupiter, the biggest DeFi platform on Solana.
At KKR he led the firm’s digital assets and blockchain strategy. Now he runs a company with 20+ onchain products, $3 billion in TVL, and a plan to put US stocks, a stablecoin, a neobank, and AI agents on the same rails. His core argument is simple: the value in crypto has moved from blockchains to applications. He calls it the fat app thesis. And he thinks onchain finance is still 10x to 100x smaller than its real market.
This isn’t a recap. It’s the playbook: the six best ideas from the conversation, the exact quotes, and what to do with each one.
About Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu: Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu is President of Jupiter, Solana’s largest onchain finance platform. Before Jupiter, he was Digital Operating Partner at KKR, where he led technology value creation across the portfolio and ran the firm’s global digital assets and blockchain strategy, backing crypto funds and companies including Anchorage Digital. He has seen both sides: how value gets built in traditional private equity, and how it gets built onchain.
“The biggest companies in crypto are basically centralized exchanges or market makers who are extremely intransparent and are running on centralized databases.”
Why this matters: Jupiter is what the next generation of financial institutions might look like. It started as a DEX aggregator three or four years ago. Today it is the number one trading venue and the number one TVL protocol on Solana, it launched a stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and in May it put regulated US equities onchain with Jump Trading and Securitize. Robinhood, Coinbase and OKX already route through its APIs. We recorded this live at Proof of Talk in Paris. Here it is in six ideas.
🎯 Jump to the best parts
[00:00] Cold open: $1.2 trillion and the road map
[00:30] Live from Proof of Talk in Paris
[01:05] From KKR to the biggest DeFi app on Solana
[02:26] The inflection point: blockchains finally got fast
[03:12] The fat app thesis
[03:43] What Jupiter is: 20+ products, $1.2T in volume
[04:44] Jupiter Lend, JLP, and their own stablecoin
[05:52] Why “onchain finance,” not DeFi
[07:56] The 100x gap: millions of users vs. Binance’s 300M
[09:00] The two unlocks: RWAs and agentic finance
[10:31] Agents don’t do KYC
[11:39] The Jupiter agent kit is live
[12:37] How institutions plug in today
[14:29] Bitwise and up to $1B into Jupiter Lend
[15:11] Jupiter Global: the onchain neobank
[15:40] Tokenized US equities with Jump and Securitize
[17:07] What tokenized stocks actually unlock
[17:52] The road map: super app, neobank, JupNet
[18:38] Wrap
Important Links
Jupiter: https://jup.ag
Securitize / Jump / Jupiter tokenized equities announcement: PR Newswire
Jupiter Lend x Bitwise (Ethena market): PR Newswire
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiao-xiao-j-zhu-12078730
Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts
🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers
Our biggest takeaways from this conversation
1. The value moved from blockchains to apps.
For years the money in crypto was made at the protocol layer. You bought the chain, not the things built on it. Zhu says that flipped, and it flipped because blockchains finally got fast enough to build real products on.
“Value was initially in crypto created at the protocol level, at the blockchain level, to now really an era of the fat app thesis.”
The irony he points out: everyone came to crypto for decentralization, but the biggest crypto companies are centralized exchanges and market makers running on ordinary databases. Not because they were lazy. Five to seven years ago, chains simply couldn’t handle the volume.
The inflection came in the last two to three years, when Solana and newer L1s and L2s solved most of the scalability problems.
The result is a new generation of apps like Jupiter and Hyperliquid: permissionless, self-custodial, and built fully onchain, at global scale.
The question he thinks matters now: what applications, brands and user experiences can you build at scale on top of blockchains? Not which chain wins.
What to do with this: if your digital asset exposure is all protocol-level, you own the last cycle’s thesis. Look at where usage and fees actually accrue now: the application layer.
Related reads:
→ 184: Kraken is buying DeFi
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