The $JUP Airdrop with Jupiter founder Meow

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of DEXs on Solana. Today we're talking to Meow from the Jupyter Project, which is perhaps the super DEX, the Super Exchange on Solana. We'll talk about what that is.

Earlier this week, the Jupe token, the highly hotly anticipated token out of Jupiter,

has actually launched. This token was announced back at Solana Breakpoint in November of last year.

Uh, and it's been hotly anticipated ever since. Uh, it just came in at a six billion dollar fully diluted valuation, which is equivalent to Uniswap on Ethereum. So a very big launch. We got about $800 million of that actually circulating. So that is the actual market cap. And we're bringing on Meow the founder. That is his pseudonym. Apparently, it's very close to his actual real name, but people just call him Meow. He is a cat in a spacesuit on Twitter. We're bringing on Meow to talk about what is Jupiter, what is Jupiter under the hood, uh, and then also the token launch. So this will, I think, be a hybrid episode for the Ethereum community, which Bankless, of course, has uh is the majority of the bankless audience uh who have never experienced Jupiter before or maybe only touched it once or twice, have heard about it, but don't really know what it is. That would be, I would call the first part of the episode, the first half. And then the second half of the episode is going to be more geared towards the Solana people who are interested in the details of the launch of Jupe. There was a bit of controversy about the launch of Jupe that I heard. I am not super tapped into these conversations, so I'm coming at a very high level. Uh, Meow will give his account and explanation of the mechanism for the jupe launch. Um, he will give his side of the story. I do not have the capacity to give what might be the other side of the story. So you'll have to search for that elsewhere when whatever Solana circles are discussing this. So there's a disclaimer there, I guess. Um, overall, uh found it a pretty fascinating. There are definitely some differences about what Jupiter is on Solana versus what the typical DEX aggregator is on Ethereum.

Meow walks through all of those things. Uh, and then we also just get into the other conversations like the load on the Solana network, what's next for the Jupyter team with the liquidity that they have sourced as a result of the token launch, and also what's next for Jupyter teaser they are hiring if you are looking for a job. And now let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Meow from Jupiter. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bank Listation, I'm here with the founder of Jupyter

named Meow. Meow, welcome to the show.

Hey, how's it going?

Nice to meet you, Meow. So you just had a uh gargantuan token launch. Uh a six billion dollar app just launched a token uh coming in at six billion dollars at fully diluted value. Yeah. Uh new value into the world. Uh congrats on that. How does it feel to be post-launch?

Oh man, thanks for asking.

No, no, no one has really

Asked you that yet.

No no seriously, thanks for asking, because no one has really asked me yet, right? So thank thanks a lot for asking.

Um

you know that the team has worked really hard, right? And um and certainly the the funny thing is this, right? Like we do control the value, right? We don't. Right? Uh in fact, if you ask me and stuff, it's like, okay, it's like the market gave us this value, right? Then uh then on our end, I think we're incredibly lucky, right, and fortunate, right?

Um to be a recipient of this value, right? You know, um I think um

And uh I I think um it is on one hand, like, okay, we are grateful that things didn't mess up.

Um we are extremely grateful that um

I mean we were able to give a present, right? You know, to a lot of people, you know, right? I mean, lots of people are like, I I mean obviously I wish they kept their jupe, right?

But lots of people are like, hey, I could pay for my meal, hey, I could buy a I I could finally buy my iPhone, right?

And I feel like um

I feel like that kind of I mean obviously we hear a lot about people like you know they they they're playing as gaming system and getting lots of like lots of capital but there's all these like you know many small stories right you know and and and that's pretty happy for me so I think uh

I think it feels very um grateful you know so I think on one hand uh I think um it is like accumulation of a lot of work done

um so we're very happy to do the do and manifest that

right you know uh also giving praise on people and also uh and and and last but not least I think um

um I think uh you know I think um it marks the beginning you know I think uh this whole process has been this um

Amazing community process, right? Because value is not generated by a team.

If you're making a pencil, for example, maybe, right? But if you're if you're making a coin, a currency, a token, right? Then the value is generated by community, right? Ecosystem, right? You know, so um, last but not least, obviously, incredibly grateful to the community and ecosystem, right, for doing this. Yeah.

Well, yeah, and I think Solana as an ecosystem is learning how to do airdrops. Uh, we had the Jito drop. Uh, this is like the second big drop after Jito. There's been others as well, but really these are kind of the two big ones. Uh, and so I'm uh one of the things I've been curious about is just learning about how Solana app teams learn to navigate a very difficult process of like beginning actually to like decentralize uh their whole app. I want to get into that subject later, but um, as you probably know, and as listeners definitely know, this is more, we have a more of a Ethereum focus on Bankless. We are familiar with Ethereum, we know how these uh systems work on Ethereum. Uh so I want to uh unpack what Jupiter is uh under the hood for our more Ethereum centric audience. Um the next bit of questions is is like if I were to pop open the hood of Jupiter, what would I see? How is it different? And and then I'll I'll ask how does Jupiter uniquely leverage Solana?

Uh but for uh people that don't know what Jupiter is or don't know don't know what it is and haven't used it before,

what what is Jupiter? Um it's it's uh a a exchange on Solana, but like take it from there. If I were to like look under the hood of Jupiter, what would I find?

Okay, so so if you if you don't look under the hood, just look at the car, right? We are uh we are a full we are a full service exchange, right? You know, we have uh we have we have swap, very limit orders with DCA.

Right, uh we have herbs and our and we serve a gateway to Solana, onboarding to Solana, and we also have a um a launch pan, right, which you just launched, right? You know, yeah, so so that's what you see on the outside, right?

And what you see on the inside is that um you see this um extremely

um uh um

meticulously designed

um and elaborately engineered over three or four years, actually over two or three years.

System meant to route, route, find the best routes across the whole Solana network

in a way that is as fast as possible, right?

Because as as you guys know, Swanna's block term is 400 milliseconds, right?

And also Swana's transaction speed is very, very, very fast. And also transaction fees are very much much lower, right?

So in many ways, in many ways, compared to other um our networks, whereby um so basically we had to find so we had to aggregate across all the markets and then uh also find routes, not just for like larger trades, but also very small trades, right? So our goal is very simple, right? So whether you're doing a two cent trade or whether you're doing a hundred dollar trade or a million dollar trade, right? We want to kind of effectively kind of route through the system, right, in a much more uh effective way, right?

Um and one big difference with Ethereum is this so uh Ethereum's constraint is gas fee.

Right? Or we know that. So Swana has a different set of constraints, right? It's like the account, the account size limit is smaller and different. So it's like basically how do we kind of like constantly navigate that? So how do we kind of like uh build a system that's extremely optimized, right? For like Swana's like you know, speed and uh cost, uh, but sometimes like you know um handle its limitations, you know? Yeah, so so that's kind of what we see.

Um that and and and and that's the sock aggregation. So that soft aggregation powers a number of systems, right? It powers the um it powers um it powers the sock, obviously.

It powers the limit orders, it powers the DCA, you know, but it also powers certain key things about the um the perps as well, right? You know, yeah, so um and uh yeah, so I think uh a number of things. Yeah, so so that's why it's under hood. Yeah.

On the surface, you have these different ways of swapping. You have the swaps, a limit order, uh dollar cost averaging and perps. These are all just ways to make a trade happen. And then under the hood, you say that it's a DEX aggregator. We have DEX aggregators on Ethereum, right? Like they do exactly what you say. They find liquidity across Ethereum and then they package it into the best execution for their users.

Is Jupiter a source of liquidity as well? Is it like an AMM like Uniswap as well? Or is it more just of a an aggregator of liquidity and it finds liquidity elsewhere on Solana? Where is the liquidity coming from?

So uh three different three different ways, right? Um the the the the first way the for the swap limit on a DCA, there's no um there's no liquidity.

For the perps, we have liquidity. Actually, we actually have one of the uh the one we actually have one of the most uh largest by volume

perks platforms in DeFi. Um our perps did about 1.4 billion in volume last week.

Okay, so Jupyter hosts its own liquidity for its perps product.

Yes, precisely. Right? You know? Yeah, precisely, right? And then and then and then and then for launch pad, uh, and then for launch pad, uh we get uh we source liquidity right from teams, right, to host on the platform, right? You know, and then uh and and also obviously we also host the um airdrop as well, right? You know, for people as well. Yeah. So um, yeah, so and and and I think I I would I would say this. I think um

we um we are extremely so um and and by the way, we we really I think one thing that I'm very proud of at Jupyter, right, is that

uh we really push the limitation of Solana to a limit.

Right? Like for example, there were a few things like for example, Solana in the past had this

problem where transactions can only be so big when they send the transaction in, right? And they implemented local tables. So we're the first to implement local tables, we're the first to implement priority fees, and the first to implement like a bit like and basically anything that

Solana does, we're the first to incorporate into our system. So I think I think we are like a really good example of composability on Solana. Because we can basically go through like six or seven markets on Solana for like a transaction fee of like 0.002 cents. You know? Yeah. So I think that's actually one uh really, really cool thing, I think. Yeah, that we really focus on. Yeah.

Yeah. I definitely want to lean into that, but really just to round out the liquidity question. The swaps and the limit orders, where do those where does Jupyter source its liquidity if it's not um every everywhere on Solana? So there's other like AMMs or other order limit orders on other apps, and then Jupyter finds them.

So there are so so there are actually a few there are actually uh uh a range of it's actually interesting. Uh it might be interesting for for your audience, right?

Um because um on Swana you also have uh, for example, you know, stick stick stick and unsticking, right? So for example, if you if you go um if you go from uh um soul, right, to stick so liquid stick soul.