Solana's Decentralized Nasdaq Thesis: Network Economics, Inflation Reform, and the Future of On-Chain Price Discovery

The Solana ecosystem stands at a pivotal moment in its evolution. While network revenue has experienced four consecutive months of decline, a fundamental shift in market microstructure is revealing deeper truths about value accrual in decentralized finance. Meanwhile, new proposals to reform the network's inflation rate, Jupiter's ambitious expansion into becoming a DeFi super-app, and the rise of prop AMMs are all converging to shape what could be Solana's most consequential transformation: becoming the venue where on-chain price discovery happens for the broader crypto market.

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In a recent episode of Lightspeed, Blockworks Research analyst Carlos Gonzalez Campo joined host Danny to dissect these interconnected themes, offering insights into everything from the granular details of network revenue composition to the high-level vision of Solana as a decentralized Nasdaq.

The State of Solana's Network Revenue

Solana's network revenue has entered a notable period of decline, but the underlying data tells a more nuanced story than simple bearishness. According to Blockworks Research analysis, Solana generated approximately $27 million in revenue (REV) during November 2024, marking the lowest figure since February 2024. This represents the fourth consecutive month of declining network revenue, a trend that has caught the attention of analysts and investors alike.

The decline, however, is not uniform across all revenue streams. Priority fees have decreased by 58% since July 2024, when Jito's block engine modifications were announced. More dramatically, Jito tips have plummeted by 85% over the same period, falling from approximately $45 million per month to under $7 million in November. This sharp divergence points to a significant shift in how transactions are being processed and valued on the network.

"What we've seen over the past few months is this shift in market microstructure where transactions are increasingly favoring priority fees as opposed to Jito tips," Carlos explained during the discussion. This evolution reflects both improvements in network efficiency—particularly advances in the Agave client by Anza—and fundamental changes in the composition of on-chain activity.

The nature of trading activity has transformed substantially since the beginning of 2024. Earlier in the year, the majority of decentralized exchange volumes were driven by meme coin trading, which typically involves contentious transactions where being first is paramount. This dynamic naturally favored Jito tips as traders competed for block inclusion priority. Today, however, the volume profile has shifted dramatically toward SOL-USD pairs, particularly through prop AMM trading, which exhibits significantly different characteristics and lower basis points per trade.

Application Revenue's Remarkable Resilience

While network revenue has contracted, application-level revenue has demonstrated remarkable resilience, creating a fascinating divergence that may have profound implications for how investors think about value accrual in the Solana ecosystem. The ratio between application revenue and network revenue has reached an all-time high, fundamentally altering the traditional hierarchy of blockchain value capture.

"At the beginning of last year, applications on Solana combined were earning around $1 in revenue per every dollar in network revenue for Solana," Carlos noted. "In November, applications on Solana are earning about $3 for every dollar in revenue in network revenue. So that has 3x'd in this span of 22 months."

This shift raises critical questions about where investment opportunities lie. If applications are capturing an increasingly dominant share of the value generated within the ecosystem, should the traditional "Layer 1 premium" compress over time? The data suggests that the better opportunity for investors may increasingly reside at the application layer rather than the base protocol level.

The implications extend beyond simple investment considerations. This trend represents a maturation of the Solana ecosystem, where the infrastructure layer has become sufficiently commoditized that applications can build differentiated value propositions that capture user attention and economic activity. Protocols like Phantom, pump.fun, Jupiter, and others have demonstrated the ability to generate substantial revenues by owning direct relationships with end users.

SIMD-411: A New Approach to Inflation Reform

The Solana community is preparing for another significant governance decision with SIMD-411, a new proposal to accelerate the network's emission schedule. This proposal arrives approximately a year after SIMD-228, which failed to achieve the consensus necessary for implementation. The new approach reflects lessons learned from that earlier attempt and takes a fundamentally different strategy.

SIMD-228 faced substantial pushback primarily due to its complexity. The market-based inflation mechanism it proposed made Solana's future inflation rate difficult to predict, which proved concerning for both community members and potential institutional investors. SIMD-411, proposed by Lost in a from Helius, takes the opposite approach by modifying a single parameter while maintaining full predictability.

The proposal is elegantly simple: double the disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. This change would accelerate Solana's path to its terminal 1.5% inflation rate from approximately early 2032 to early 2029. By reaching the terminal rate three years earlier, the proposal would cut approximately 22 million SOL in additional emissions—roughly $2.9 billion at current prices.

"Importantly, what this does is it will cut about 22 million SOL in additional emissions, which is about $2.9 billion at today's prices," Carlos explained. "So it kind of wants to reduce this leaky bucket pressure that we see with excess inflation, which is honestly not needed for security today."

The benefits extend beyond simple supply reduction. Lower nominal staking yields could incentivize greater SOL usage in DeFi applications, potentially driving more economic activity on-chain. The proposal maintains the predictability that institutional investors require while addressing concerns about excessive inflation diluting existing holders.

Governance Evolution and Staker Voice

The governance process itself is undergoing significant evolution following the SIMD-228 experience. One of the key realizations from that failed proposal was that stakers were too removed from the governance process, with validators serving as de facto representatives who may have conflicting incentives.

Under the current system, validators can split or vote among staking options—yes, no, or abstain—but stakers don't have a direct say in how their stake influences governance outcomes. This representative democracy model proved problematic when validator incentives diverged from those of their stakers, particularly for institutional providers like ETF issuers or centralized exchanges who benefit from maintaining higher nominal inflation rates regardless of real returns.

Following the Solana Accelerate conference in May, significant work has been undertaken to develop new governance tooling that would allow stakers to take ownership of their own votes, potentially overriding validators if they choose. While the timeline remains unclear, this new tooling is expected to launch after Breakpoint and could fundamentally alter how governance decisions are made on Solana.

"So this is one of the reasons I think that SIMD-411 has probably a better chance of passing than SIMD-228 because in SIMD-228, you saw conflicting incentives between some validators," Carlos observed. The combination of simpler proposal mechanics and potentially more representative governance could create a pathway for successful implementation.

The simplicity of SIMD-411 also addresses concerns raised by prominent voices during the previous governance debate. Solana Foundation's Lily Liu, who opposed SIMD-228, primarily argued that the unpredictable inflation curve would harm traditional finance appetite for SOL staking. SIMD-411's straightforward parameter change completely resolves this concern, making the future inflation trajectory as predictable as the current schedule—just faster.

Jupiter's DeFi Super-App Ambitions

Jupiter has emerged as one of Solana's most ambitious protocols, but its rapid expansion into multiple product categories has sparked debate about whether the team has spread itself too thin. The protocol now operates an aggregator (its original core product), a perpetuals trading platform, the Decentralized Token Formation (DTF) platform for token launches, Kalshi-powered prediction markets, and JupyterLand (a lending integration via Fluid).

The recent WET token launch via the DTF platform highlighted both the promise and challenges of Jupiter's expansive approach. The initial public sale was entirely sniped by a few addresses, forcing the team to implement countermeasures including deprioritizing high-priority fee transactions and launching at unexpected times to level the playing field. While the eventual outcome was successful—with WET trading at approximately $280 million fully diluted compared to a $69 million public sale price—the rocky execution raised questions about resource allocation.

"I do think they have lost a little bit of focus by trying to be a DeFi super-app that does everything," Carlos acknowledged. However, he also recognized the strategic logic underlying Jupiter's expansion: "Jupiter is probably the team that understands best that owning the end user is incredibly valuable."

This insight points to a fundamental truth about protocol economics in crypto. Protocols that own direct user relationships can monetize those relationships across multiple product offerings and pivot when market conditions change. Those that don't—like Raydium, which never owned the end user—remain vulnerable to upstream decisions that can eliminate their primary revenue sources overnight.

Jupiter's mobile wallet, their acquisition of various front-end applications, and their integration of multiple trading services all reflect this understanding. Even if individual products underperform, maintaining the user relationship provides strategic optionality that pure infrastructure protocols lack.

The Communication Imperative

Both Jupiter and pump.fun have faced criticism for inadequate communication during challenging periods, highlighting a broader truth about crypto markets: communication is not optional for successful protocols. Unlike traditional companies that can maintain relative silence between quarterly earnings, crypto projects face constant scrutiny from token holders and community members who expect regular updates.

Jupiter's founder, Meow, had been relatively quiet on social media before recently becoming more active again. This return to public engagement was noted positively by analysts, as he had previously been the main public face carrying Jupiter's communications. The ability to transmit constant or frequent updates about product development and strategic direction appears to be a meaningful factor in maintaining community confidence.

pump.fun faces similar scrutiny, with its founder Alan reportedly silent for approximately two months despite the platform still generating approximately $1 million in daily revenue. While the revenue performance has been remarkably resilient even as broader on-chain activity has declined, the lack of communication has generated skepticism about the sustainability and composition of that revenue.

"Crypto is very specific, like different from other industries, and I don't know why, but you expect constant communication from the founder, or you get icky about the token and about the project," Carlos observed. This expectation, while perhaps unique to crypto, represents a genuine market reality that successful protocols must navigate.

The JupyterLand and Kamino Drama

Beyond the WET launch complications, Jupiter's lending integration through JupyterLand has generated controversy, particularly regarding its relationship with Kamino. The drama centered on Kamino not allowing certain positions to be converted to JupyterLand positions, alongside concerns about how position isolation risks were communicated to users.

This episode illustrates the challenges inherent in Jupiter's strategy of integrating external products rather than building everything internally. When outsourcing key functionality to partners like Fluid for the lending product, Jupiter cannot maintain the same level of quality control and user experience consistency that it could with fully in-house development.

The differentiated approaches between Jupiter's "everything app" strategy and Kamino's specialized focus on credit markets will ultimately be tested by market outcomes. Only time will reveal whether the super-app model or the specialized excellence model proves more successful in DeFi, but both represent legitimate strategic choices with their own trade-offs.

pump.fun's Persistent Revenue Mystery

pump.fun continues to generate substantial daily revenue despite the broader decline in meme coin trading activity, raising questions about the composition and sustainability of that revenue. The platform has consistently produced $1 million or more in daily revenue even as anecdotal experience suggests declining retail participation in meme coin trading.

"I found it so weird that on-chain activity has been down across the board and pump is still doing like $1 million in revenue per day because just from an anecdotal experience, I don't know that many people who are still trading meme coins on a daily basis on pump," Carlos noted. "I'm just wondering what the source of that revenue is."

The shift in market share to Bonk earlier in the year demonstrated the fragility of launchpad economics. Within weeks, approximately 90% of market share shifted from pump.fun to the competing platform, highlighting that launchpads don't truly own end users—the trading actually happens through external applications like Axiom and other trading bots.

pump.fun has responded strategically by working on a mobile app and acquiring Padre, the trading application, demonstrating an understanding that capturing the actual trading interface is essential for sustainable value capture. However, greater transparency about revenue composition would help address community concerns about sustainability.

Yield-Bearing Assets and DeFi 2.0

One of the most exciting developments within Solana DeFi is the emergence of what Carlos terms "DeFi 2.0"—a new cohort of applications that have gained significant traction even during market drawdowns. Protocols like LoopScale, Exponent, and Hylo have achieved all-time or near all-time highs in total value locked despite SOL declining approximately 40% since September.

"Which to me signals decreasing reliance on just SOL doing well, and that's an incredibly exciting thing for me," Carlos explained. This reduced correlation with the base asset's price performance represents a maturation of the Solana DeFi ecosystem.

Exponent has emerged as a particularly interesting protocol, functioning similarly to Pendle on Ethereum as a yield-stripping mechanism where users can speculate on yields through principal tokens (PTs) and yield tokens (YTs). The protocol broke $100 million in TVL for the first time earlier in 2024, though initially this was driven largely by Fragmetric's restaking farming. Following that expiry, Exponent has rebuilt to approximately $120 million in TVL, but with a fundamentally different composition.

Crucially, the majority of Exponent's current TVL comes from USD-denominated yield-bearing instruments rather than SOL-linked assets like LSTs or JLP. This shift toward stable-denominated yield assets suggests a more sustainable foundation for the protocol's growth.

New Forms of Yield Coming On-Chain

The Solana ecosystem is seeing an expansion of yield-bearing assets that offer uncorrelated or differentiated return streams. Onri offers yields derived from reinsurance markets, providing returns uncorrelated to crypto market movements. The recent Prime integration with Kamino offers yield from US real estate. Hylo provides cryptonative yield through its HYUSD and Axial mechanics.

These diversified yield sources are significant because they expand the addressable market for Solana DeFi beyond pure crypto speculation. Protocols like Exponent become increasingly important as intermediaries that allow users to speculate on and optimize exposure to these various yield streams.

The composability of these yield-bearing assets with existing DeFi primitives creates opportunities for sophisticated strategies that were previously impossible. As more yield sources come on-chain, the potential for Solana to serve as the primary venue for yield discovery and optimization grows substantially.

Prop AMMs and the Perpetuals Opportunity

The dominance of prop AMMs (proprietary automated market makers) in spot trading for highly liquid pairs has opened questions about whether similar designs could revolutionize perpetual futures trading on Solana. Currently, platforms like Humidify have demonstrated the ability to capture more volume on SOL-USD pairs than Binance spot markets, representing a significant achievement for on-chain trading.

"I am really curious and wondering if you can kind of use that prop AMM design for a perps DEX, and if that can be like a huge unlock for Solana going into 2026," Carlos suggested. "I think one of my predictions going into next year is that we'll actually see a perpetuals decentralized exchange from Solana that is using to some extent prop AMMs for the liquidity."

This innovation could address one of the persistent challenges facing on-chain perpetuals: liquidity depth. By leveraging the same mechanisms that have made prop AMMs successful in spot markets, a perpetuals venue could potentially offer competitive execution with centralized alternatives.

The Ranger ICO represents one upcoming project to watch in this space. Ranger functions as a perpetuals aggregator platform on Solana, potentially serving as a bridge between various perpetuals venues while the market develops.

Solana's Structural Advantages for Equities

The race to capture equity perpetuals and tokenized stock trading represents a significant opportunity where Solana may have structural advantages over competitors like Hyperliquid. The key differentiator lies in composability: Solana has both spot tokenized equities (through platforms like X Stocks) and the potential for perpetuals on the same chain.

"I can imagine it would be easier probably for market makers or for delta-neutral participants to hedge their perps positions with the X Stocks instrument because you have both the spot and the perps on-chain," Carlos explained. "As opposed to Hyperliquid where you only have the perps product but you don't really have a spot product to hedge or do any other sort of interesting trading strategies."

This composability creates opportunities for sophisticated market participants that aren't available on venues offering only one side of the equation. Delta-neutral strategies, basis trades, and other advanced techniques require access to both spot and derivatives markets, potentially making Solana a more attractive venue for institutional and professional trading activity.

Currently, X Stocks generates relatively modest volumes—seven to low eight figures daily—but the introduction of prop AMM liquidity for these instruments could dramatically improve execution quality. Nobody wants to trade tokenized stocks on passive DEXs where slippage reaches several percent, but competitive quotes from prop AMMs could unlock meaningful trading activity.

The Decentralized Nasdaq Vision

Perhaps the most compelling long-term thesis for Solana centers on becoming the venue where on-chain price discovery happens for crypto assets more broadly. Currently, the majority of price discovery occurs on centralized exchanges, but both Solana and Hyperliquid have made significant progress in capturing this critical function.

"If Solana can be the place where on-chain price discovery happens, then they have a real shot at fulfilling this decentralized Nasdaq kind of vision," Carlos argued. "I do think having price discovery on-chain for Solana is probably one of the most important things for the ecosystem, and it's probably one of the most important things for REV as well."

This vision connects directly to the network revenue concerns discussed earlier. If Solana can capture price discovery for major crypto assets, the trading activity and MEV opportunities would flow to the network, potentially reversing the revenue decline and establishing a sustainable economic foundation.

Evidence that this transition is already occurring exists in the CEX-DEX arbitrage dynamics. Historically, when SOL traded at different prices between centralized exchanges like Binance and decentralized venues, the arbitrage would flow through centralized exchange books. Today, prop AMMs are capturing this arbitrage by updating their oracles quickly and providing liquidity for traders to buy on DEXs and sell into the prop AMM.

"You've kind of already seen this transition from just centralized exchanges to prop AMMs, and eventually you'll probably see on-chain price discovery happen on Solana, hopefully within the next year or two years," Carlos predicted.

Trading Native Assets from Other Chains

The thesis extends beyond trading Solana-native assets to potentially capturing trading activity for assets native to other blockchains. The excitement around trading wrapped Monad (MON) on Solana before the chain even launches demonstrates the community's appetite for this type of cross-chain activity.

If Solana can establish itself as the most liquid venue for trading assets regardless of their native chain, it creates a powerful network effect. Traders go where liquidity exists, and liquidity concentrates where traders go. Early momentum in capturing cross-chain trading activity could compound into a dominant position.

The growth of prop AMMs is central to this possibility. These market makers actively provide liquidity and tight spreads that make trading attractive. As their sophistication and capital bases grow, they can extend their coverage to additional assets, potentially including tokens native to competitor chains.

Lightspeed Investor Relations Portal

While not the central focus of the discussion, the announcement of the Lightspeed Investor Relations portal (in partnership with Solana) represents an important development for the ecosystem. The dashboard product aims to offer services for investors, protocols, and funds to improve investor relations communication.

This initiative addresses the communication challenges discussed throughout the episode. By providing standardized tools and frameworks for protocol-investor communication, the portal could help raise the baseline expectation for transparency across the ecosystem. Given the importance of communication in maintaining community confidence—as demonstrated by the Jupiter and pump.fun examples—better infrastructure for investor relations could have meaningful impact on protocol valuations and community health.

Looking Ahead to 2026

The convergence of several themes points to 2026 as a potentially transformative year for Solana. The SIMD-411 inflation proposal, if passed, would accelerate the network's path to sustainable tokenomics. The continued evolution of prop AMMs could capture increasing shares of trading activity from centralized venues. New perpetuals designs leveraging prop AMM mechanics could emerge. And the expansion of yield-bearing assets creates opportunities for differentiated DeFi offerings.

The application layer's growing share of ecosystem value suggests that successful protocols will increasingly determine Solana's competitive position rather than base-layer performance alone. Jupiter's super-app ambitions, pump.fun's dominant launchpad position, and emerging DeFi 2.0 protocols like Exponent will all play crucial roles in attracting and retaining users.

Most fundamentally, the progress toward capturing on-chain price discovery could establish Solana as the decentralized Nasdaq—the primary venue for crypto asset trading. This vision, if realized, would drive sustainable network revenue through organic trading activity rather than speculative token emissions.

The Multi-Product DeFi Thesis

Blockworks Research has identified multi-product DeFi as a core thesis for 2025, and the Solana ecosystem exemplifies this trend. Protocols that began with dominance in single categories are expanding into adjacent products, seeking to capture additional revenue streams and deepen user relationships.

Jupiter's aggregator-to-super-app evolution represents the most ambitious version of this strategy, but similar patterns appear across the ecosystem. Liquid staking protocols have expanded into restaking and DeFi integrations. Lending platforms have added new collateral types and risk management features. Trading venues have introduced perpetuals alongside spot markets.

This expansion creates both opportunities and risks. Protocols that successfully execute multi-product strategies can build defensive moats through user relationship ownership. Those that spread too thin risk mediocre execution across all products, potentially losing to more focused competitors in each category.

The Importance of User Ownership

The repeated emphasis on "owning the end user" throughout the discussion reflects a fundamental truth about value accrual in crypto. Infrastructure providers that don't have direct user relationships remain vulnerable to decisions made by those who do. Raydium's loss of pump.fun's graduated token liquidity illustrates this vulnerability starkly—a single routing decision eliminated their largest revenue source.

Protocols that invest in wallet applications, mobile interfaces, and direct user acquisition build defensible positions regardless of how the underlying infrastructure evolves. This explains Jupiter's mobile wallet development, pump.fun's Padre acquisition, and similar moves by other protocols to capture the user interface layer.

The strategic implication for investors is that evaluating protocols requires understanding not just their current products but their user relationships and the defensibility of those relationships. A protocol with strong user ownership can pivot to new products; one without must continuously compete for distribution.

Conclusion

Solana stands at an inflection point where multiple trends—declining network revenue offset by growing application value, inflation reform efforts, super-app emergence, and prop AMM dominance—are converging to reshape the ecosystem's fundamental dynamics. The decline in network REV, while concerning at face value, may reflect a healthy transition toward application-layer value capture that better reflects actual user preferences.

The SIMD-411 proposal offers a pragmatic path to addressing inflation concerns while maintaining the predictability that institutional investors require. Unlike its predecessor, the proposal's simplicity should enable clearer community deliberation and potentially successful implementation.

Jupiter's ambitious expansion, despite execution challenges, reflects correct intuitions about the importance of user ownership in crypto. Even if individual products underperform, maintaining user relationships provides strategic optionality that pure infrastructure plays lack.

Most critically, Solana's progress toward capturing on-chain price discovery through prop AMMs represents perhaps the most consequential development for long-term ecosystem value. If Solana can establish itself as the venue where crypto assets achieve price discovery, the network effects and revenue implications would be substantial.

The decentralized Nasdaq thesis isn't merely aspirational—evidence suggests the transition is already underway. The question for 2026 and beyond is whether Solana can extend this success from SOL-USD pairs to broader asset coverage, potentially including tokenized equities and assets native to other chains. Success would establish Solana as the primary venue for on-chain trading across the crypto ecosystem.

Facts + Figures

• November 2024 Network Revenue: Solana generated approximately $27 million in REV (network revenue), the lowest since February 2024 and the fourth consecutive month of decline.

• Priority Fee Decline: Priority fees decreased 58% since July 2024 when Jito's BAM was announced.

• Jito Tips Collapse: Jito tips plummeted 85% over the same period, falling from approximately $45 million per month to under $7 million in November 2024.

• Application Revenue Ratio: Applications on Solana now earn approximately $3 in revenue for every $1 in network revenue, up from a 1:1 ratio at the beginning of 2023—a 3x increase over 22 months.

• SIMD-411 Inflation Proposal: Would double the disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, bringing inflation from 4.10% to terminal 1.5% by early 2029 instead of early 2032.

• Emission Savings: SIMD-411 would cut approximately 22 million SOL in additional emissions, worth roughly $2.9 billion at current prices.

• SOL Price Decline: SOL decreased approximately 40% from its September highs through November 2024.

• WET Token Performance: The Humidify WET token launched at $50 million FDV (whitelisted), $69 million (public sale), and traded at approximately $280 million FDV at time of recording.

• Exponent TVL: The yield-stripping protocol broke $100 million TVL in mid-2024 and has rebuilt to approximately $120 million, with majority exposure now in USD-denominated yield-bearing instruments rather than SOL-linked assets.

• pump.fun Daily Revenue: Continues generating approximately $1 million to $1.5 million in daily revenue despite broader market decline.

• Trading Composition Shift: The majority of DEX volume has shifted from meme coin trading earlier in 2024 to SOL-stablecoin pairs through prop AMM trading.

• Humidify vs Binance: Humidify prop AMM has achieved higher volume on SOL-USD pairs than Binance spot trading for those pairs.

• Jupiter Product Suite: Includes aggregator, perpetuals, DTF (token launch platform), Kalshi prediction markets integration, and JupyterLand lending via Fluid partnership.

Questions Answered

What is causing Solana's network revenue decline?

Solana's network revenue has declined for four consecutive months primarily due to a shift in market microstructure away from Jito tips toward priority fees. Since Jito's BAM announcement in July 2024, priority fees decreased 58% while Jito tips collapsed 85%. This reflects both improved network efficiency from Anza's work on the Agave client and a fundamental change in trading activity composition—from contentious meme coin trades that required high MEV payments to more liquid SOL-USD pair trading through prop AMMs that don't require expensive block inclusion competition.

Why might applications be capturing more value than the base layer?

Applications on Solana have increased their revenue capture from a 1:1 ratio with network revenue to approximately 3:1 over 22 months. This shift reflects the maturation of the ecosystem where infrastructure has become sufficiently commoditized that applications can build differentiated value propositions capturing user attention and economic activity. Protocols like Phantom, pump.fun, and Jupiter have demonstrated the ability to generate substantial revenues by owning direct user relationships, raising questions about whether the traditional "Layer 1 premium" should compress as investors recognize where value actually accrues.

What is SIMD-411 and how does it differ from the failed SIMD-228?

SIMD-411 is a new inflation reform proposal that would double Solana's disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, accelerating the path to terminal 1.5% inflation from 2032 to 2029. Unlike SIMD-228, which proposed a complex market-based inflation mechanism that made future rates unpredictable, SIMD-411 maintains full predictability through a single parameter change. This simplicity addresses the primary concern that led to SIMD-228's failure—institutional investors and community members wanted predictable inflation schedules rather than variable market-driven rates.

Is Jupiter spreading itself too thin with multiple products?

There is legitimate concern that Jupiter has lost some focus by pursuing a DeFi super-app strategy across aggregation, perpetuals, token launches, prediction markets, and lending. Recent execution challenges with the WET token launch and JupyterLand communications support this view. However, Jupiter's strategy reflects correct intuitions about the importance of owning user relationships—protocols without direct user access remain vulnerable to upstream decisions. Even if individual products underperform, maintaining user relationships provides strategic optionality that pure infrastructure protocols lack.

Why is on-chain price discovery important for Solana?

On-chain price discovery represents perhaps Solana's most important long-term opportunity. Currently, most crypto price discovery happens on centralized exchanges, but if Solana can capture this function, it would drive substantial trading activity and MEV opportunities back to the network, potentially reversing revenue declines. Evidence suggests this transition is already occurring—prop AMMs are now capturing CEX-DEX arbitrage that previously flowed through centralized exchange books. Becoming the venue for price discovery would establish Solana as a "decentralized Nasdaq."

What advantages does Solana have over Hyperliquid for equity trading?

Solana's composability provides structural advantages for equity-related trading because it offers both spot tokenized equities (through X Stocks) and the potential for perpetuals on the same chain. This allows market makers and delta-neutral participants to hedge perps positions with spot instruments on-chain, enabling sophisticated strategies impossible on venues offering only one side of the equation. Hyperliquid currently lacks spot equity products, limiting the trading strategies available to professional participants.

What is "DeFi 2.0" on Solana?

DeFi 2.0 refers to a new cohort of Solana applications that have gained significant traction even during market drawdowns, including protocols like LoopScale, Exponent, and Hylo that reached all-time or near-all-time high TVL despite SOL declining 40% since September. This reduced correlation with the base asset's price performance represents ecosystem maturation. Notably, platforms like Exponent have shifted from SOL-linked assets to USD-denominated yield-bearing instruments, suggesting more sustainable foundations for growth.

Why does communication matter so much for crypto protocols?

Crypto markets have unique expectations for constant communication from founders and teams that don't exist in traditional industries. Silence—even during periods of strong fundamental performance—generates skepticism about tokens and projects. Jupiter's founder Meow becoming more active on social media after a quiet period was viewed positively, while pump.fun's founder Alan remaining silent for approximately two months has generated concern despite the platform's resilient revenue. Better communication infrastructure, like the announced Lightspeed Investor Relations portal, could help address these ecosystem-wide challenges.