Jupiter: From humble beginnings to dominating DeFi
What started as a DEX aggregator for optimizing token swaps has now grown into a massive ecosystem of products on Solana. Let’s explore the Jupiter’s key products, starting with its core offering — Swap.
The Genesis…
Founded by Meow and Siong in October 2021, Jupiter had one goal — To let us swap our tokens at the best possible prices. And they did that perfectly. The Swap feature optimizes the best swap routes across various exchanges and liquidity pools.
Jupiter Swap has processed over 750 million swaps worth $350 billion in volume since launch.
Source: https://dune.com/ilemi/jupiter-aggregator-solana
As a DEX aggregator, Jupiter solved the fragmented liquidity challenges. Different DEXes have different prices, which means different asset prices. This inefficiency increases the slippage risks.
Jupiter aggregates multiple decentralized exchanges to evaluate the prices, liquidity, and other factors and suggests the best route for the token swap.
Jupiter’s trading experience is further enhanced by Solana’s fast transaction speeds and low fees.
Key factors that have made Jupiter stand out:
- Best prices
- Minimal slippage
- Smooth UX
- No platform fees
Jupiter quickly became the go-to platform for token swaps on Solana. But the team didn’t just stop there — they have been expanding their offerings to meet the needs of traders and investors on Solana. Let’s now take a closer look at how each of Jupiter’s products contributes to the trading and investment journey.
Advanced Trading Tools: Your Solana One-Stop Shop
Swap was the first offering from Jupiter. Now there are tons of other things part of it. The suite of trading tools caters to both casual investors and professional traders. It lets people start simple and then gradually unlock more complex tools as they get more comfortable and experienced. We will have a look at Limit Order, DCA, VA and Perps in this section.
Limit Order
Limit Order lets you buy or sell assets at a specified price rather than the market price. You take the control of your trades.
Buy Limit Order: When buying you can specify the price you want to buy the token for. The order will be executed only if the market price of the token falls to the limit price which you have set.
For example, you can place a buy order for Solana for 190 when Solana is at 220. So if Solana goes down to 190, then your order will get executed.
Sell Limit Order: Now say you want to sell at a price higher the what the market currently offers, then you can put the price you want to accept with a sell limit order. Once the price hits the specified price, the token is sold.
The key benefit of a limit order is that it allows you to have more control over the price you want to buy or sell the tokens. But there is a downside as well. Your order may never get executed if the market price doesn’t meet the set limit price.
Try it here: https://jup.ag/limit/USDC-SOL
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA)
Jupiter also provides strategies for long-term investment where you invest a fixed amount of funds at regular spans instead of timing the ups and downs of the market. This is to reduce the impact of market volatility. Jupiter automates this for you.
Ideal for users who are looking to invest passively
- who want to accumulate in the long run or
- those want to take out profits regularly
Say you have $200 you want to invest. You can set up DCA in Jupiter to buy $100 worth of your preferred token every month instead of putting the entire $200 in 1 go. This same strategy can apply when you are selling.
Try it here: https://jup.ag/dca/USDC-SOL
Value Averaging (VA)
It has a similar approach to that of DCA, but the focus is on the target portfolio for each period instead of equal investment.
For example, you want to increase your portfolio by $100 each month. Your 1st month’s target is $100 and the token you want to buy is $20. So you buy 5 tokens ($100 / $20). For the 2nd month, your target is $200. But the token has pumped to $25. That means your previous month’s 5 tokens are now $125. So you need to put $75 more to buy 3 tokens and meet the target. All these tasks are automated.
Try it here: https://jup.ag/va/USDC-SOL
Perpetual Trading
This product lets you make leveraged trades. For example, with 10 SOL, you will be able to make a larger trade say a 50 SOL or 100 SOL trade.
Jupiter lets you leverage up to 100x positions for various tokens. Unlike the traditional futures, these positions do not have an expiration date. But perps trading is very risky. Especially because of the borrowed money.
There are two ways to trade
- Long — you bet the price will increase
- Short — you bet the price will decrease
Try it here: https://jup.ag/perps
Onboard: Navigating DeFi Made Easy
The platform also focuses on making decentralized finance accessible to all. Jupiter has created an Onboard suite to lower the friction. Onboard simplifies it for both newcomers as well as experienced traders to get started on Solana. It is designed to simplify things in a step-by-step manner — from helping people buy crypto with regular fiat currency to making it easy to move assets between different chains.
Onboard comprises of the following:
- Onramp — Easily buy crypto using traditional payment methods like credit cards
- Bridge (USDC & deBridge) — Transfer your assets from others chains to Solana
- CEX — Transfer your assets from a centralized exchange like Binance
Onramp
This is for new users who do not have any assets in their wallet or they want to add more assets. Lets you buy the crypto assets using the traditional banking methods.
Bridge
Currently there are 2 options on Jupiter using which you can transfer your assets from other chains to Solana
- USDC
- deBridge
USDC
This functionality in Jupiter allows you to send your USDC from different chains like Ethereum, Base, Polygon etc. to Solana without any slippage and fees.
It uses Circle’s CCTP for bridging across the chains.
deBridge
This allows you to send assets from other chains to Solana or the other way around. In this functionality you can you can move any assets across chains and try out the various apps out there.
CEX
You can also transfer assets to your Solana wallet from a Centralized Exchange (CEX) like Binance, Coinbase, ByBit, and OKX.
Try it here: https://jup.ag/onboard
Latest Ecosystem Products
Jupiter continues to experiment and release innovative products that cater to both beginners and professional users. Here are some of the latest additions to its growing ecosystem.
Jupiter Mobile app
It is designed to be super simple for beginners and powerful for the pros. Imagine it like having everything in your pocket, where trading is free, fast, easy and secure.
Easy onramp instantly with a credit card, Apple Pay or PayPal which can onboard more users. you get one click swap for all the Solana tokens and all this at zero platform fees
App is available only on both iOS and Android.
Try it here: https://jup.ag/mobile
Check out this detailed guide on how to get started on Jupiter Mobile App: https://beyondtheswap.medium.com/a-beginners-guide-to-jupiter-mobile-defi-in-your-pocket-5811cc7bb743
ApePro
Another new offering from Jupiter is a Memecoin trading platform. Think of it as a “professional trader’s app” but for memecoins.
Made with a focus on trading the meme coins smoothly on mobile as well. Shows you the newly launched tokens instantly along with their safety profile.
- Easy account setup: MPC-based AA program with social logins (powered by Web3Auth)
- Best swap prices: lowest fees plus smart fee optimization (powered by Jupiter)
- Quick & protected trading: Protected swaps without signatures (powered by Jito)
Try it here: https://ape.pro/
I have written a detailed guide to ApePro here: https://beyondtheswap.medium.com/apepro-map-shovel-combined-into-one-3fd8bcf4b9de
Fox
This is another experimental product from Jupiter which allows trading tokenized odds.
There are 3 potential outcomes for the events — Yes, No or Refund (in case of an ambiguous event). You can only claim your winnings after market resolution. But if you want to claim early then you might find buyers on external markets. The key feature is that the market-driven odds that change with demand.
The first test phase outcome was on “Will Trump win the 2024 US elections?”
How it works is, if you think Trump will win, You buy “Yes” tokens. For example: You spend $10 and get 25 “Yes” tokens.
- If Trump wins — your tokens have some value and you can claim your winnings
- If Trump loses — your tokens have no value :(
The same steps apply if you think Trump won’t win. In that case, you buy “No” tokens and if Trump loses you win.
This is an experimental platform currently in the alpha stage and it is not audited.
Try it here: https://fox.jup.ag/
Beyond Trading: Holistic DeFi Solutions from Jupiter
Jupiter isn’t just about trading — they’re building a complete DeFi ecosystem that works for everyone. We saw from swaps to advanced features, their tools are designed to meet different user needs. Let’s check out what other products they’ve built to support this vision.
LFG launchpad
As the name suggests it is a launch pad for Solana projects to launch their token. It is community-driven and designed to give the project the best chance of success along with protecting the users.
Key Features
- Fair Launch System: Everyone starts trading at the same time. There are no unfair advantages to privileged groups
- Smart Liquidity Management: The projects can customize their price curves. They get built-in protection against price crashes. And the users can sell tokens back (unlike most launches where they can only buy)
- User-Friendly Trading: Lets the user set limit orders before launch. Users can also take advantage of DCA. They also get protection against excessive gas fees
- Built for Scale: Can handle millions of airdrop claims with top-tier infrastructure
Launchpad V2 is coming soon in early 2025.
Try it here: https://lfg.jup.ag/
Jupiter Lock
This product lets you lock tokens and release them over time (vesting) in zero fees. A wide range of vesting options are available from yearly to as small as minutes.
Initially, lock was available only for projects to help them implement the vesting schedules and cliff periods. But now it is available for everyone.
This offering is currently in beta and it has been audited by two of the reputed security auditors Ottersec and Sec3
Try it here: https://lock.jup.ag/
JLP Pool
Jupiter Liquidity Providers supply the liquidity to enable the perps trading.
These liquidity providers deposit various assets into the liquidity pool. The underlying tokens are SOL, ETH, wBTC, USDC, and USDT.
For providing liquidity they get a portion of the generated fees in return. The more liquidity they provide the more fees they earn.
JupSOL
These are the staked SOL tokens on Jupiter’s validator.
But why Stake? The benefit is that you get yields on your staked SOL which would otherwise have been idle in your wallet.
What makes JupSOL different from most of the other liquid-staked token is that Jupiter is returning all the validator MEV rewards to JupSOL. So that means it should lead to higher APY than other native staking alternatives.
The Future
What sets Jupiter apart from other products is its user-centric approach. Jupiter’s API is widely used by many other Solana projects, making it the backbone for many DeFi applications. Even with such a wide range of products, Jupiter is just getting started.
There are a lot of new experiments planned for 2025. We will be covering them and a lot more topics on this blog.
Follow the below Jupiter links for all the latest news.
Discord: https://discord.gg/jup
Jup X handle: https://twitter.com/JupiterExchange
JUP DAO X handle: https://x.com/jup_dao
JUP Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Jupiter-Exchange
For any feedback or suggestion please reach out to me @its0xRay on X or Discord. If you found this essay helpful, do consider sharing with your friends who may be interested in exploring the products.
