Solana’s top swap venue seems immune to criticism

Despite some hiccups the last few months, its native token has traded essentially in tandem with SOL over the past few months

article-image

Akif CUBUK/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share


Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter


No matter how crazy things get, Jupiter’s market share seems impenetrable for the time being. 

Last week, the swap aggregator and Solana DeFi everything app had two of its programs closed by an unauthorized user who gained access to its private key used for program deployments. 

User funds were safe, the engineer in charge of the programs disclosed on X, implying that he meant to make the program only upgradeable by multiple key signatures but didn’t get around to it in time. The programs have since been changed — they are now governed by a multisig that takes multiple keys to be opened. Having just one private key guarding programs with real users is a serious security mishap, and Jupiter is probably thanking its lucky stars that no funds were stolen.

But despite this, no one seemed to care much. One commenter chastised the Jupiter engineer for leaving the “keys in the ignition,” but otherwise, the oopsies was met with a collective shrug. 

On one hand, you could point out how near misses happen all the time in DeFi, and the space moves far too quickly for the crypto world to take stock of seeming minutiae like this. But the non-incident also perhaps points to something that doesn’t get talked about as much: Jupiter’s seemingly-uncrossable moat in Solana DeFi. 

Jupiter’s calling card is its swap function which algorithmically routes trades across various liquidity venues to execute swaps with the best possible prices for users. When I set up a test swap of PYUSD for JitoSOL, it first proposed to route the funds through Raydium then to Meteora and onto Orca before returning to my wallet. This product is widely-used in Solana DeFi, and it tends to outperform competitors. While writing this article, I set up a quick few different swaps on Jupiter and Phantom, and Jupiter gave me a better price every time.

Because of this product, Jupiter finds itself somewhat immune to controversy — for now. Around a month ago, Jupiter founder meow penned a mea culpa apologizing for poor user experience with things like gas fee estimation, adding that the Jupiter felt “quite hurt” that their products weren’t performing as intended.

But despite it all, there seems to be little negative impact on Jupiter. Its native token has traded essentially in tandem with SOL over the past few months. The platform has risen to become the third-largest in Solana DeFi by TVL, and it’s seen the most inflows over the past week of any Solana protocol with over $50 million — despite two of its programs being compromised.

Unless a better competitor emerges, Jupiter just seems to have a pretty good thing going on at the moment (though for what it’s worth, I made a similar case for pump.fun, which may finally be running out of steam). 

In the meantime, Jupiter is building out a host of other features as part of its utopian “grand unified marketplace” vision. There’s a lot of benefit to having one killer product prop up other lines of business. Amazon famously used its web services to bankroll its online marketplace for many years.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Research Report Templates.png

Research

The convergence of DePIN and energy generation aims to address modern grid challenges by incentivizing distributed generation.

article-image

However, they noted there’s now an increased risk that unemployment and inflation will rise in the coming months. 

article-image

The network’s most ambitious upgrade since the Merge brings validator streamlining, smart account UX and doubled blobspace to Ethereum

article-image

Debate over extra Bitcoin use cases has returned, two years on from Ordinals

article-image

Altcoin season may be on a permanent pause as the market matures and paths grow more selective

article-image

Today’s blockchains are more like nervous systems without a brain — wiring without will

article-image

A number of blockchains make use of the Solana Virtual Machine