# Jito Declares War on Coinbase & Binance | Lucas Bruder on the Launch of JTX

*Author: David Hoffman*
*Published: Jul 15, 2026*
*Source: https://www.bankless.com/es/podcast/jito-declares-war-on-coinbase-binance*

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**TRANSCRIPT**
David:
[0:02] Bankless Nation, I'm here with Lucas Bruder. He is from Gito, and he's building something pretty cool. Lucas, welcome back to Bankless,

David:
[0:08] my man. How are you doing?

Lucas:
[0:09] Pretty good. Thanks for having me. It's been a while.

David:
[0:12] It has been a while. It has been a while. We're going to dive into what you're doing over at JTX. But I first kind of want to just ask, what's going on in the Solana neck of the woods? Like what's going on over there? Because I'm not really too tapped in. So what's it like being in Solana right now?

Lucas:
[0:26] It's pretty crazy. There's a lot going on. I think there's kind of this weird mismatch between the crypto sentiment and the market. I feel like people are still kind of leaning a little bearish, but I feel like on Solana, it's full steam ahead. And so I would say the top two things going on right now, obviously, the Ansem and what he's doing has been very popular recently on Twitter. But the other thing that's really cool that we're excited about is all these tokenized stocks that are coming out and what Backpack and Xstocks and Ondo and some of these other guys are doing. It's super cool. So yeah, like getting SpaceX day one, some of the memory stocks, and then today the new memory stock IPO is happening and that should be listed pretty shortly. So I feel like there's a lot of cool stuff going on in that kind of area right now.

David:
[1:17] Has there been just a market winner or market leader in the tokenized stock camp on Solana yet? Or is it still pretty much a pretty fierce competition?

Lucas:
[1:25] I think it's, if you look at volume, I believe Backpack is winning. But I would say the number of assets that they have, I think it's like probably, it's like around five assets where if you look at some of the other providers, it's like tens or hundreds. I think there'll be some changes there pretty soon and expect to see a lot more assets listed. So I would say it's still pretty early on in the tokenized stocks, but I would say that's one thing Solana is really exceeding at right now. There's a few days where tokenized stock volume was higher than meme coins. And it's cool to see that flip. Like we've been talking about it for a while, like Solana's this meme coin chain. And when you see all these tokenized stocks come on, it's like,

Lucas:
[2:11] okay, yeah, the thing that we've been preaching this whole time is finally coming true.

David:
[2:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is pretty exciting. Let's get into what you're building at JTX. So you're the founder, CEO of JITO, which is for people who speak Ethereum, that's if Lido and Flashbots had a baby. So a liquid staking token plus transaction ordering and MEV management all in one product. Now you're going vertical, you're verticalizing into JTX. Let's talk about JTX. What's JTX and why are you building it?

Lucas:
[2:44] JTX is a prosumer trading terminal. And so we feel like there's a piece of the market that's missing where... Solana execution has gotten really good, but a lot of the tools that exist today are kind of more on the meme coin side of things. And so we're really targeting this prosumer audience. We think there's going to be a ton of assets that come on to Solana, not only like other L1 assets, but tokenized equities. And we feel like there's kind of a lack of good user experience for those types of traders on Solana today. And so, yeah, we really want to build something that gets more people on chain. There's only so much that you can do at the infrastructure layer to make that happen. And so we spent several months ideating and decided this is the best way that we can get people on chain. And so, yeah, we've been building this since like the end of March and be rolling out pretty shortly here.

David:
[3:39] So Gito is known to be just extremely technically competent at the block level of Solana, like down in the basement where like the microstructure of Solana really matters. And you have to be just super intimately familiar with just the pipes of Solana, just like the actual like architecture and foundation. You guys are verticalizing into a consumer application, which makes sense because you guys have the knowledge and the integration about transaction ordering, but it is a new domain for you guys. Like now you're in the world of like user

David:
[4:10] products and user experience. What makes you think that you can go up there and get out of the basement and into like the front door of and become the front door of Solana?

Lucas:
[4:20] I think that we have the top team on Solana for shipping. And I think if you've looked at our past, like we're the number one validator client block builder on Solana since like 2022. Largest and like deepest liquidity on Jito Sol. And so I think this is just a natural extension of what we've done. It's going to be way different. And the way that we're thinking about this is way different. And we brought on some more people to help us with this. So like thinking a lot about retention and user growth and like dedicated customer support and like all this stuff that we haven't really done before. And so everyone at Jito is super hungry and we're excited for this challenge and been talking to a lot of people and kind of learning common mistakes and lessons and things like that. And yeah, we're really looking forward to the challenge. I think it's going to be fun. And yeah, we're going to kind of start with this like Solana native audience that knows us super well, but that's definitely not the end goal. We got to grow the pie. And so we got to expand out from crypto Twitter and

Lucas:
[5:24] find other audiences to come trade.

David:
[5:26] So maybe just simulate for myself and the listeners what JTX like is from a, if I just like go on, it's opening up pretty damn soon here. It's got the waitlist opening. And so I'm a user, I'm going up to JTX. And what do I see? How would you explain it to me?

Lucas:
[5:43] The experience that's most equivalent to would be like a centralized exchange. And so I would say very clean user experience. You can see all the assets that are available to trade. Very simple order box. We kind of abstract away a lot of like the token specific stuff that, Yeah, like if you go on a centralized exchange, the UI is really clean, where if you go into products on Solana, it's like, oh, they go super deep on the weeds on all this stuff. Like, is the token frozen? And like, what is the distribution in the top holders? And like, all this stuff that you really care about if you're trading meme coins. And so it's a very clean UX, very good order types that basically like only the pros have access to. So we're giving everyday users access to really cool orders like TWOPs. And we have this thing called Smartfilla we can dive into a little bit. And yeah, just a really, really clean user experience. Someone that is not familiar with crypto can just jump in. We're using Privy for key pair management. So you can sign in through email. You can set up pass keys and all that. So it's super secure.

David:
[6:53] Extranges of old, the DEXs of old, would always be pointed towards the people who are pretty informed about how a blockchain works. And so therefore, they've been designed to be pretty unopinionated. Like, don't make choices for me. Like, I know what a contract address is. Like, I need to know the nature of what this contract address does. So please inform me. And then it gives all of the, like kind of the hardcore trenchers, all the tools they need to know to make, you know, an uninformed purchase of a brand new token. But then it's just so scary to like the retail audience, the people who don't

David:
[7:26] know what they're doing. And so it sounds like you're taking JTX and being more opinionated about what is shown and how it's shown and even what assets are shown. Like talk about the opinionated choices that you guys are making.

Lucas:
[7:41] I would say not showing a ton of token information is one of the opinionated choices that we're making. We are not building this for people in the trenches that are holding, If you look at some of the platforms where people trade meme coins, the average hold time is like less than a minute. And like at the upper end of it, it's like less than 10 minutes. So we are not building for those people. We're not building for the token that launched five seconds ago, where you need to know the distribution. We're building for, I would say, maybe like the $1 million market cap and up tokens and tokenized equities and majors and things like that. And so I would say that's one thing.

Lucas:
[8:23] This won't be available at launch, but we're going to do some pretty cool things around equities that no one's done before. So I think the equities experience on Solana leaves a lot to be desired. If you go to any tokenized equity on Solana, there's like... What, there's probably three or four versions of NVIDIA at this point. Like there's three or four versions of NVIDIA. Each one has a different chart and they reference the on-chain chart. So like if you look at the price charts, there's like a ton of like WICs if there's like low liquidity. And so we'll be doing some interesting stuff around that. And yeah, I'm trying to think what else is opinionated. I would say P&L and like portfolio management is like the key thing. So people when they're trading they're not just looking at what is their current balances, they want to know what has their P&L been over time what was my entry on this token, what is my unrealized P&L, they kind of think in terms of risk,

Lucas:
[9:26] so that would be a very important piece of this.

David:
[9:29] So since Gito you said that Gito is perhaps the best engineering team on Solana, and you guys are like I alluded to earlier, is like just intimately familiar with transaction ordering and not even in familiar, but just like in charge of transaction ordering because of Gito's positioning. How are you leveraging that ability and knowledge inside of JTX? And I'm assuming those things are kind of wired together. So when somebody makes a trade on JTX, Gito's transaction ordering ability provides a better execution price for JTX. I could only assume. Talk about that.

Lucas:
[10:04] Yeah, there's no preferential treatment in BAM or anything else for like, oh, this is a JTX transaction. We're going to treat it differently. But there's a ton of stuff that we've learned over time. So like routing transactions, landing them quickly. And then like, how do the prop AMMs work? And, you know, maybe there's specific validators that are doing stuff that we don't want to send these transactions to because they might get sandwiched. And just like a ton of different edge cases in the network that we've learned over time.

David:
[10:37] So that's an opinionated choice. So you guys choose validators or exclude validators based off of their behavior.

Lucas:
[10:43] Yeah, yeah.

David:
[10:45] That's pretty cool.

Lucas:
[10:45] And yeah, so yeah, that's one thing that we do. And then the other thing is, one thing, I mean, we do this for basically every prop AMM on Solana is using something that we call a maker priority plugin inside BAM. And so that means that all the makers for these prop AMMs across all these different assets on Solana, they basically get put at the top of the block on Solana inside the BAM blocks. And so this allows them to quote tighter because they don't have to get worried.

Lucas:
[11:15] About getting picked off. And so essentially quotes are really tight. And so you will see that inside BAM where like, you know, the quotes are going to be really tight. You'll be able to see the transactions getting routed through JTX and landing on chain.

Lucas:
[11:32] And we will, I guess one opinionated thing that I just remembered is we have this thing called GoodTrade. I don't know if you've used JTX. I think we gave you access to it, but we have this thing called GoodTrade. And so... When you swap a token, let's say I want to buy $1,000 of Sol via USDC on JTX. When you make that trade, we will look at the output amount and we will run that same trade on the best centralized exchanges at the same time, and show you how much money you saved on-chain compared to Solana. And so we're already seeing really good results. It's much cheaper to trade majors on Solana. And so, yeah, I think some of that's from BAM and some of that's just from like prop AMMs and all the really good teams working at the infrastructure there.

David:
[12:23] So if I'm like buying Bitcoin on Solana or something or Sol on Solana or something, you will go and look at Kraken and Coinbase and wherever, Binance or whatever, and then simulate those trades and then also provide a quote on Solana and the user will be able to see that difference?

Lucas:
[12:41] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, we think Solana execution has really advanced in the past 12 or 18 months. And there's a ton of innovation happening at the PropA mem layer, a bunch of stuff on Twitter, and BlockWorks is putting out a bunch of good stuff around that too. But execution's gotten really good. But I feel like it's kind of stuck in this Twitter sphere where when you say the best place to buy Solana is on Solana, that kind of... I feel like people don't believe that. and it's like stuck in this Twitter sphere. So in JTX, every time you make a trade, we will rerun that and show you how much money you saved. And so we're really bringing that really good execution quality front and center

Lucas:
[13:25] and show that Solana can beat centralized exchanges when it comes to trading.

David:
[13:30] And I'm assuming if I asked you, is this feature that a centralized exchange has in JTX, is that feature that a centralized exchange has, is it in JTX? The answer is yes. Like that's kind of the point of it. So like, you know, limit orders, TWAPs, like all that kind of stuff is in JTX. What about perps? Are perps in JTX? Because you guys aren't building an exchange. You guys are building a front-end, a consumer experience transaction ordering technology, but you guys aren't building the exchange. So what about just a perpdex? Is that integrated in JTX?

Lucas:
[13:59] It won't be at launch, but shortly after launch, we are looking at Phoenix perps, and we'll be integrating that. And so they have some really cool technology they're quickly listing more and more markets. And so we're super excited about that. We have a lot of wood to chop on like the best spot experience. We don't want to bite off too much. But once that's in good state, we want to go into perps and then prediction markets. And I think a big driver is going to be like what people,

Lucas:
[14:29] what the feedback is and like what people want to trade.

David:
[14:32] So who's your competition then? Are you trying to compete with like the Jupiters or like the pump funds? or like who do you consider yourself to be the competition? Like where do you want to take market share from?

Lucas:
[14:42] I would say the centralized exchanges are our main competition. So, you know, there's, you can, you can look at the pie as like, I want to take market share from others, or I want to grow it. And I think we have been in the business. And one of the reasons why we're so successful is like, we are trying to take market share from everyone else, you know, centralized exchanges and like NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange and things like that. And so that's the multi-year vision is that's who we're going after. Of course, like a lot of the way that we talk about JTX right now is just focused on Solana native people. And that's what we're going to go with. That's our wedge. But I think over time, we will continue to go more and more after centralized exchanges and start to get into the equities as well.

David:
[15:34] Are you going to put an on-ramp into JTX?

Lucas:
[15:37] Yeah. Yeah, we will. There's a few options we're looking at right now. But yeah, I think most of the people in Solana, they have Sol in their wallet already. So yeah, they're kind of onboarded already. But yeah, there's a... Man, I don't know if you've used an on-ramp recently, but some of the fees that those things charge are just insane.

David:
[15:56] Yeah. Yeah, the direct on-ramps, like the on-ramps onto centralized exchanges are cheap because centralized exchanges have that control. And so if there's like fraud, they can lock up your funds. You can't withdraw from the centralized exchanges. But I would imagine JTX doesn't have that because you guys are non-custodial And so that's why the direct on-ramps on-chain have to add fraud into their charges. I would imagine if you're trying to compete to be feature parity with centralized exchanges, in the longest of time horizons, JTX would actually have a custodial arm to it so that it can onboard retail or users who don't yet have assets on Solana. Have you thought about that?

Lucas:
[16:40] I haven't, no. It's an interesting idea. Yeah, obviously you want the onboarding experience to be super fast and easy. So like debit card, credit card, bank account. And yeah, hopefully there's a good option that we can find that's cheap on fees. But yeah, rolling it in-house could be interesting. There's definitely, that would be something completely new for us, but I think we could pull it off with our team. And we have Rebecca too, who's a super badass CLO for us.

David:
[17:09] Oh, the Rebecca, the Rebecca, Rebecca Reddit. Yeah. Okay, yes. Yes, you do.

David:
[17:16] Let's talk about a JTO value accrual from JTX. JTO has a token, it's JTO. JTX, no new token. JTO is the token. Talk about how JTX benefits the JTO token.

Lucas:
[17:27] So 80% of the revenue from JTX will go to the DAO and... I think we're trying to figure out what to do with that. You know, you could do, you could burn it. You could just have it sit in the Dow. We'll figure out what happens there pretty soon. But 80% of all the fees from JTX will go to the Dow. The other 20% will go to reinvestment. And so as we see more and more people go on to JTX and trade, that will, you know, in turn buy more JTO and send it to the Dow. And all the fees on JTO or on JTX will be used to buy JTO and return it to the DAO. So we're not giving the DAO USDC or any of these like meme coins that might go down 99% that we collect fees in.

Lucas:
[18:20] It's essentially just continually swapped to JTO and sent to the DAO.

David:
[18:24] So Solana has vastly improved its execution is what you've been saying. So the value, your claim, your idea is that Solana execution is just really, really good. And so what you're doing is you're creating JTX to kind of like wrap up Solana and all of the assets on Solana and all of the very strong execution on Solana. And you're really just wrapping Solana into a prosumer trading experience. And I don't know what the market cap of JTO is, but it's compared to Sol. Sol is like what, 40 billion right now? 50 billion? 60? Something like that. Multiple tens of billions and JTO is valued how much? 1 billion?

Lucas:
[19:06] The FTV right now is probably like 600 or 700 million.

David:
[19:10] 700 million? Okay, so if you're taking 80% of the trading fees of this trading experience and you're buying JTO and not burning it, but buying it and giving it back to the DAO why would I ever buy Sol? If JTX is successful at what it wants to do? Why would I ever buy Soul instead of JTX?

Lucas:
[19:32] Well, I think there's going to be, I mean, obviously I hope we, capture a huge amount of the market share that exists in trading, but there's going to be a bunch of other stuff happening on Solana that will not be going through JTX. So like arbitrage and things like that are going to be going on, people trading meme coins.

Lucas:
[19:52] I think there's been a lot of, like even just unrelated to JTX, there's been a lot of cool and there's been a lot of cool proposals that I think we're going to go to vote soon on Solana tokenomics. So there's one, I can't even remember the name, the numbers of the SIMDs right now, but there's one that will double disinflation. So it'll basically cut the inflation. The rate that inflation decreases, it'll double the speed of that. So basically, yield will go down and the amount of tokens being emitted by the protocol will go down. Less sell pressure should help number go up. And then there's another burn one as well that is basically suggesting that.

Lucas:
[20:39] There's an increase in burn based on the number of transactions. discussions. The network processes and how many resources they use. Right now, the burn in Solana, it's just flat. And so there's basically a flat fee per transaction. There's no resource-based fee. Like if there's computationally heavy transactions or super cheap transactions, the amount of burn that changes on the network, it doesn't exist. And so I would say those two proposals, there's other stuff coming too that should really help, you know, and make Solana deflationary.

David:
[21:17] So the idea of like, so in Ethereum, which is the economic system that I'm familiar with, if there's just like enough slack in the system, the fees are zero. That's not true with Solana.

Lucas:
[21:26] There's a base fee. There's some priority fees as well. Blocks are not full right now. There'll be some spikes where they're full, but I think they're probably around 50 to 60% full right now. There's still a lot of priority fees being paid though. A lot of traders and arbitragers and things like that have a need for speed and they're willing to pay for it.

David:
[21:47] So the bulk of soul burn comes from the priority fees, the contestion?

Lucas:
[21:51] No, the bulk of priority fees is basically just a function of how many transactions are being processed a day.

David:
[21:58] So there's a straight volume, straight volume.

Lucas:
[22:01] Yes, straight transaction volume. Those could be like a lot of, Yeah, it's just based on the transaction count, essentially. And so, yeah, if we can get the rate of inflation down and then charge based on the, essentially on the block size, then that would be, super helpful for sole tokenomics, especially as we start to see, basically every new asset that comes on chain that people want to trade. There's a prop AMM spun up for it. And, you know, there's like probably 10 or 20 prop AMMs. So, like, you take every prop AMM, They need to send an Oracle on chain. There's, you know, every new equity that comes on chain is going to have a prop AMM. And so the amount of transactions that are going to be generated as and more

Lucas:
[22:47] and more assets come on chain is just going to be insane.

David:
[22:50] When you say execution on Solana has gotten drastically better over the last like 18 months, is that because of the prop AMMs? Like how much of that is due to prop AMMs?

Lucas:
[22:57] Yeah, I would say there's... Two main things. One, I would say is just core protocol work. So the work that Anza and Fire Dancer and us and other core client teams are doing to make the network faster. I don't know if you use, I think last time we chatted, it was like right around the Jito airdrop, maybe shortly after. If you use the chain back then, it was just like a nightmare to use. Like transactions wouldn't land. Basically, everyone was landing transactions through Jito because like the normal pipeline was just super, it was just buggy and like not good. And so there's been a ton of really good work at the core protocol layer. Blocks are going up and they're like getting bigger and bigger. The core client teams that we should get, we should almost double block size within the next like month, I would say.

Lucas:
[23:50] And so that's going to help a lot too. So yeah, one is all the work going on there. And then I would say the other thing that led to execution improvements would definitely be the prop AMMs. And so, yeah, those are just really efficient at expressing what the market maker wants to do. And they're kind of putting the market maker logic on chain. It's really, really cheap to update the pricing for that asset just because of the way it works. And yeah, I guess the explain like I'm five is like if you're running an order book and you want to shift your orders around you have to go to every tick and like cancel it so you have to cancel all these orders and then like move your mid over and like replace all the orders, where these prop ams they kind of just they have this curve and then they can basically just shift this point around and so shifting that that midpoint price, it's super cheap it's like, I think the cheapest Prop A&M Oracle update is like sub 100 cost units, where if you want to make a trade on an order book, it's like 40,000. Right.

David:
[25:00] So it's just like an engineering efficiency innovation in terms of just like putting market maker logic on chain. It's just like a way better way to do it.

Lucas:
[25:11] Yeah, it's been really cool to see too. So yeah, I think there's like the super OG one called Lafinity. They shut down recently, but the next main one was SolFi from the Ellipsis team, the team that's building perps. So they were like the first team that created this like next generation of prop AMMs. And, you know, now we have like Humidify and BisonFi who's run by Jump Trading or Jump Crypto and, you know, Scorch and Tessera and all these prop AMMs. And then you start seeing prop amms pop up on base and other l2s and now we're seeing prop amms go on to ethereum and they're doing, on ethereum they're doing similar stuff to like bam's maker priority plugin where they have top of bat the block builders like titan and others can like receive prop amm updates and, get all these super tight spreads that are like tighter than the tightest centralized exchange onto all these chains. And so that's been something really cool to see that, like that's born on Solana. And then now we're seeing it on L2s and Ethereum. And I think there's some people doing it on Robinhood chain as well. And that's just been really cool to see that, like innovation being born on Solana and like taking that to other chains. And I think, you know, hopefully all these other chains can offer spreads that are tighter than the

Lucas:
[26:35] tightest centralized exchange pretty soon.

David:
[26:37] What's the AMM word doing in a prop AMM? Is that accurate? Can you explain that to me?

Lucas:
[26:45] Let's say it's accurate enough to get the point across.

David:
[26:49] Okay, so like an AMM is like what Uniswap invented, you know, X times Y equals K or whatever that exchange is. It's been a while since I've thought about that equation. And then the idea of a prop AMM is like, you know, with Uniswap V3, something that we saw, maybe this was even happening in Uniswap V2, was that you would see just-in-time liquidity come in on the Uniswap V3 curve. And the Uniswap V3 curve had concentrated liquidity so you could, well, X times Y equals K was a constant slope. The slope didn't change. What Uniswap V3 brought to the table is you could add liquidity just in a particular band on that slope. And so parts of that slope would have very high liquidity and it would be around the mid-market price of an asset. And then the tails of the slope would have no liquidity because why would you ever provide liquidity for like $10 ETH? Just don't do that. Or a million dollar ETH. also don't do that, you know, hopefully one day, but no. And so what we saw is we saw like kind of in the MEV world, we would see people come in and provide very high liquidity when they saw in the mempool, somebody coming and slapping a $1 million ETH USD buy. And so they would, they would provide liquidity to capture the majority of those fees just in time inside of the concentrated liquidity. It sounds like that's what prop AMMs are doing, but rather than viewing the mempool, the logic for that is on-chain? Is that kind of the core innovation?

Lucas:
[28:16] Kind of, yeah. Every prop AMM has its own curve and they will change the curves over time.

David:
[28:25] That's why we call it an AMM, because it's a curve.

Lucas:
[28:29] Yeah. And there's some logic on chain where every prop AMM is different, but they can like widen their spreads and change the way the curve works. So if you go, there's a really cool website people can view. If you go to sandwich.me, if you go on the left side, there's a prop AMM section. And so you can see the curves from all these different market makers and the spreads on chain. And so yeah you can click through some of these like if you like go to bison fi you can look to see their spreads are pretty tight right now like half a bit, and they have a really steep curve and then if you go to some of the other ones you know their curves are a little wider and maybe not as steep so yeah this is the this is a unified sole usdc, view of all the curves and then you can click.

David:
[29:22] So the aggregate curves of all the prop AMMs of the sole USDC market.

Lucas:
[29:29] Correct, yeah.

David:
[29:30] Right, and so if I click on one of these, this is like one of the curves, and when you add them all together, you see the net curve. And this is just an order book. Yeah.

Lucas:
[29:39] It's kind of an order book. Yeah, it's like a virtual order book.

David:
[29:42] It looks like an order book. It's an implied order book. It's an implied order book.

Lucas:
[29:47] Yeah. So yeah, you can see here that for 100 Sol depth on Solana right now, you can get less than a BIP spread. That's just like insane. And so I don't think that's going to stop with Sol. We're seeing it on Bitcoin, Zcash, Hype, SpaceX. We'll probably see it on that South Korean memory stock that gets listed today. And so basically like i think that, this is not a trend that's going to slow down and like when we started looking at building jtx we're like okay things are definitely trending in the right direction and like prices are getting good, there's more asset issuance coming on the solana and so it's like this is going to be, really big and it's already beating, it's already being centralized exchanges i think it's going to start beating if it hasn't already some of these more like New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQs on prices. And you run it 24-7, totally permissionless. So...

Lucas:
[30:43] Yeah, things are happening.

David:
[30:45] Me and Mike Abolito have been pounding this drum for a while where crypto, you know, DeFi, DEXs, blockchains are never going to surpass centralized exchanges unless we can get price discovery to happen natively on chain. Like who determines the price of something? Like what the Oracle is? Right now it's Binance. It's been Binance for a while. You know, second place is Coinbase. But we need it to happen on Ethereum or Solana or some make it happen on the blockchain. And if we don't have native price discovery, if we are not the place where price is determined, then you're kind of just, excuse my language, cucked by whoever is doing price discovery. And so having price discovery happening natively on chain is such a golden goose. It's such a trophy. And it's like, the last time I talked to him about this was like a number of years ago, but we just seem to have stalled out in getting native price discovery on chain. This is why like meme coins are always on Ethereum. they're always denominated in ETH on Uniswap is because that's just like, you know, MemeCoin is launched

David:
[31:47] On Ethereum and also on Solana. And in Solana, it's, you know, the MemeCoin is paired with Sol. And that's, you know, the MemeCoin price discovery happens on chain. And that's why it's actually kind of like cypherpunk. But then as soon as like WIF volume dominates on like Binance or Solana, then we kind of like lose that chain dominance. So what I'm seeing here with Prop AMMs is like we have a new venue for getting price discovery on bigger pairs, USCC Sol, USCC Bitcoin to happen on chain.

David:
[32:20] And so like there's been just this forever arms race between order books on centralized exchanges and, you know, AMMs on blockchains. And AMMs have been really constrained. But now we have prop AMMs, which is starting to look like an order book. And so this is actually kind of giving me some renewed hope that we can get price discovery for the world's biggest assets to happen on chain. Do you think we can get that done?

Lucas:
[32:43] Oh, a thousand percent. I think we'll be seeing that, I mean, there kind of already is starting to be price discovery. There's definitely price discovery on Hyperliquid.

Lucas:
[32:55] I think Solana would be there very shortly just in like the off venue hours. So, you know, the stocks don't trade 24 seven. So there'd be some price discovery there. And yeah, I think this is, I think that Solana is not the right environment to run order books. I think it's going to be prop AMMs for the future, not only on Solana, but basically essentially every chain, unless you're like a hundred percent dedicated to order books and, or like an app chain. And, Yeah, I think this is super bearish on, just like traditional AMMs because those can never do price discovery because they rely on people arbitraging the price to bring it in line. Where if you look at Prop AMMs, there's actually like people that are making these markets and they're moving them around without getting arbitrage. Where like the, if you make like a SpaceX USDC pair on Uniswap, that's not going to be constantly discovering the correct price. It's just going to be people, other people that are going to arbitrage against it. And so this, I think prop AMMs on Solana are just going to be massive for making

Lucas:
[34:11] price discovery happen on there.

David:
[34:13] One thing that was, that is nice about AMMs, like vanilla AMMs, is you can see all the liquidity. Like you can see how much USDC is in the ETH-USDC pair and ETH and like you just have that information. With prop AMMs, we don't have that because a lot of logic is held off chain by the prop AMM. Is that true?

Lucas:
[34:31] Well, I mean, we were just looking at the curves. It's like you can see the curves.

David:
[34:35] Right, but it could mean the liquidity just like disappear inside of like a couple blocks.

Lucas:
[34:40] Yeah, I mean, that can happen on like a normal AMM too. Like if someone is the main.

David:
[34:44] True, okay.

Lucas:
[34:45] I guess that the prop AMMs are, you know, it's just one market maker running it where, you know, hopefully in the AMMs on, Like Ethereum, there's multiple liquidity providers. And the thing is on Solana, everyone is using an aggregator. So everyone's using Jupyter or Deflow or Titan or any of these other aggregators. And so they are constantly looking at the curves of all these prop AMMs and trying to route to the best venue for prices. And so if a market maker goes down, they need to, you know, it's a bug or they need to upgrade their program or whatever like that. AMM will just get pulled from the route and they'll route to the other market makers. And so you have a lot of... There's a lot of like robustness at the aggregation there, which is what most people are doing. People aren't going to like bisonfi.com and only swapping against that. They want to get all the venues hooked together. So there's a lot of like robustness going on there and it can handle like a market maker going down. And then you, yeah, you just get really good competition and like people want to get more flow. So they're quoting tighter and these aggregators are like choosing which one to go to. So there's a lot of like really cool stuff and like kind of nerd out here a little bit, but like this is what I love and I feel like we know a lot about this and kind of just ties back into like what we're doing with JTX and like

Lucas:
[36:11] really understanding a lot of the nuance here.

David:
[36:13] Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I'm seeing is just like a growing richness of on-chain capital markets. Like this is what on-chain capital markets would look like. There's a little bit more on this subject so I can understand it more. Like one of the conversations that's happening right now is the Cash Cat token on Robinhood chain that recently just like bumped because Robinhood's all about beams now. And people are like looking at the liquidity of CashCat versus the liquidity of the Ansem token on Solana. And we kind of have just like control study or like an A-B test of like, look at the liquidity of CashCat and look at the liquidity of Ansem, the Ansem coin. And people are like pointing at the Ansem coin and saying like, look at CashCat has three times the liquidity on Robinhood chain than Ansem has in the Ansem coin on Solana. Is that a fair comparison or are the prop AMMs, you know, also there's also liquidity inside of the prop AMMs that aren't being measured there? How does the prop AMM conversation fit there?

Lucas:
[37:09] I don't know if the prop AMMs are quoting Ansem right now. I mean, it's definitely a comparison you can make. I'm not really sure what you can do with that information. But all the liquidity dashboards like BirdEye and Helios and those guys and JTX, we use BirdEye on the back end. They should track the liquidity on the Prop AMMs. And so, yeah, if there's liquidity on Prop AMMs, it'll show up. But yeah, I think the Robinhood stuff's really interesting. It's just like, I had a tweet the other day about it. It's like, you might make things for like, real world use cases, but you don't really get to decide what people trade.

David:
[37:53] What happens on the trade, yeah.

Lucas:
[37:54] Yeah, there's people just want to, there's a subset of people that just want to degen and that's fine. And like for Solana, that was the best thing because it really stressed the network and it's why it's so far ahead and able to handle like the SpaceX IPO and what's going to happen later today.

David:
[38:12] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. What if a lot of assets land on Robinhood chain that people want to trade and they're not going to be available in JTX because JTX just hooks into Solana? Would you integrate something like any other chain other than Solana?

Lucas:
[38:25] Yeah, we're open to it. I would say it's not the highest priority, but definitely open to it. I think the Robinhood obviously is insane, incredible distribution, and it's going to be really good for them helping bootstrap that chain. But there's also Solana has really good distribution too. So I think it'll be interesting to see what happens. I think, You know who I'm rooting for, but yeah, I'm definitely monitoring the situation.

David:
[38:55] When I remember listening to Will Warren from Zero X Matcha, listening to his talk at East Denver, and it was kind of an indictment of Prop AMMs on Solana. Some of them have good behavior, but he was specifically calling out the bad behavior of a few Prop AMMs that would just leave in bait transactions. And so they would set the price with a bait transaction, but then they would yoink the a bait transaction and somebody would try and sell a token into that bait transaction and it was just toxic behavior to just max extract and it's just Darwinism, survival of the fittest definitely fits into that camp and then a few toxic prop AMMs would kind of spoil it for the rest of them so the rest of them were kind of dragged down into the market and kind of just really made execution toxic for retail. What's going on with that and does JTX protect users in any particular way from toxic prop amm quoting

Lucas:
[39:50] So yeah i think some of those games were going on on solana several months ago there was i think a lot of there's a lot of public data on what was going on so you could see some prop amms playing these games, i think a lot of like social shaming happened not only on solana but i've seen bits and pieces i talk and you know there's some social social shaming going on there too. I think there's a few things that you can do to mitigate this and that people on Solana and likely ZeroX team are doing too. So one is you can just watch what these prop AMMs are doing over time. And if they are starting to play games, if you own the distribution, like Jupiter or Dflow, and this is like the top of funnel where people are coming in, you can just be like stop it I'm gonna like disconnect you and or I'm gonna like route less slow to you and I'm sure there's some of that going on you know I don't know.

Lucas:
[40:49] There's probably some of that going on. The other thing that's really cool that we've started to see more recently, and I think every aggregator does this now, is some forms of on-chain routing. So this matters a lot more for high-performance networks with low slot times like Solana. But if you want to buy sole USDC, that aggregator will look at the chain state and they'll be like, okay, I'm going to go to these two prop AMMs and this AMM because that's the best price right now. And then, you know, they'll build a quote for you. You send your transaction, it lands. That can be like a second or two. On Solana, a lot can happen in that second or two. Like the prop AMMs can widen out or like maybe liquidity on the AMM gets pulled or something like that. And so we're seeing more AMMs or more of these aggregators put their actual routing logic onto Solana. And so they'll be like, okay this these amms have shown that they can quote tight and so here's like some some information that the program can use on chain like here's the amms, to look at and i will route the transaction and like build the flow and like how much gets pulled from what decks on chain so i can actually look at the live price as opposed to.

Lucas:
[42:12] You know, having this like snapshot that's stale. So that's definitely helped a lot. Those two things have helped a lot. And then like, you know, I'm sure aggregators do like some statistics and all this stuff on like who's quoting the best. So they'll kind of buy slow there. But I think that's a solved problem at this point. And we use dflow,

Lucas:
[42:32] they have some on-chain routing. So, you know, don't really have to worry about that.

David:
[42:36] Good to hear, good to hear. Let's talk about the rollout of JTX. So you guys are opening up the waitlist, a pretty big wait list on the 14th, 14th or 15th. We're recording this the week before, but listeners are hearing it the week of. How does somebody get access to JTX? And then what's the plan, the short-term plan for like the next few months?

Lucas:
[42:53] So we will be rolling out on the 14th. We're going by the number of referrals that you have. So if you're in the top like 10% or something, you'll get access earlier than if you have less referrals. So we're going to roll that out gradually. over time over the next week or so. And yeah, it's going to be really cool to see. This is like a total MVP. And so there's definitely a lot more that we have planned. This is not the final product. I would say there's a lot of stuff that we're doing behind the scenes on like more data. So that will be, no one else, we'll have a feature and no one else has. I think a lot of traders will really like on the data side and then roll into equities, perps and prediction markets after. And just keep iterating, you know, discovering bugs. What do people want?

Lucas:
[43:43] And try to ship those as fast as possible.

David:
[43:45] And what do you have for over the longest term horizons? I know you guys are just focusing on the here and now, but like, I don't know, what do you want JTX to look like by the end of the year and into the future?

Lucas:
[43:56] Yeah. I would say that you will be able to trade any asset in the world on JTX.

David:
[44:03] If somebody comes and issues it on Solana.

Lucas:
[44:06] Maybe we'll go off Solana, but I think that maybe not go off Solana, but add these other chains. But if you've been paying any attention on Twitter, you can kind of see where things are heading. Definitely in the equities world. And I think within the next probably six to nine months, you will be able to trade any stock in any country in the world on chain. And so, you know, that's the future that we're preparing for. There's a lot going on at the product level at different companies. And then hopefully we see clarity go through and the SEC exemption come through

Lucas:
[44:44] as well. And so that's definitely the direction things are heading and that's where we're going.

David:
[44:49] Lucas is sole undervalued

Lucas:
[44:53] Yeah. I mean, if you want to be a good investor, you have to... There was a podcast with Tushar the other day. He's like, yeah, usually if I'm feeling like an idiot for being in the industry, that's when I should buy. And, when I'm feeling like a genius, that's when I should sell. So it's pretty clear from the inside where things are heading on Solana. It's going to take a bit to get there. But if you want to be a good investor, you have to get ahead of these things. And so I think it's undervalued for sure.

David:
[45:24] But I suppose there's being undervalued because crypto is potentially undervalued. You know, Bitcoin's at $64,000. Ether is at $1,800. Solana's at $78. Do you think Solana is uniquely undervalued compared to the rest of the crypto industry?

Lucas:
[45:40] Yes.

David:
[45:41] Because of all the prop AM, the execution, tokenized stocks, all that kind of stuff?

Lucas:
[45:46] Yeah. I think there's a few reasons I would say. A lot of the SIMD and protocol improvements that we were talking about earlier around inflation and burning, there's tokenized equities. I think there's a lot of stuff that we're going to bring via JTX to get people trading more and also get people that don't trade on chain to trade on Solana more. There's a ton of protocol improvements coming. So we're going to go from 60 million to 100 million block size within the next month or so. And I would say the best teams win by iterating the fastest. And I would say no one is iterating faster than Solana across all the teams, not only the teams that exist today, but the new teams that are coming up too. And so if you just look at the pace of iteration on Solana, Between the protocol and all the people working on it and compare that to any other ecosystem, it's by far the best and the fastest iterating. And so, yeah, you can look at the current state of the world in crypto and be bearish, but it's hard to do that if you just look at the state of iteration on Solana.

David:
[46:59] Cool. Lucas, thanks for coming on the show.

Lucas:
[47:01] Thanks for having me.

David:
[47:02] Bankless Station, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put it in. But nonetheless, this is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.
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