JUPITER

The team came out of Mercurial Finance, a Solana exchange that wound down after FTX collapsed in 2022. Solana had a liquidity problem.

Money was scattered across dozens of small venues. Jupiter fixed it by aggregating them into one router that hunts for the best price.

It launched in 2021 and grew for years without raising a dollar.

Jupiter makes money on fees, but keeps them tiny on purpose. Core swaps cost almost nothing.

The real revenue comes from Perps, its leveraged trading product, plus recurring buy orders, limit orders, and a newer lending product. Low fees pull in volume.

Volume is the whole business.

Jupiter Swap and Ultra handle the core aggregated trading. Perps offers leveraged bets on SOL and other coins through the JLP pool.

Recurring buys and limit orders automate the boring parts. Jupiter Lend, launched in 2025, adds borrowing.

There is also Jupiter Mobile and the Moonshot memecoin app.

Two moves stand out. First, giant token drops called Jupuary handed JUP to over a million wallets starting in January 2024.

That bought loyalty fast. Second, a buying spree in 2024 and 2025 that swallowed SolanaFM, Coinhall, SonarWatch, and the memecoin app Moonshot.

Jupiter went from a simple router to a full DeFi stack.

Dominance cuts both ways. Jupiter controls so much Solana trading that people worry about one app holding too much power.

CoinDesk flagged exactly that in early 2025. The airdrops draw heat too.

Each Jupuary shrank, and the 2026 round was cut to about 200 million tokens, down roughly 70 percent, and billed as the last one.

For most of its life Jupiter had no investors at all. It ran on fees and answered to JUP token holders through a DAO.

That changed in February 2026, when ParaFi Capital put in 35 million dollars by buying JUP tokens at market price plus warrants. It was the first outside money Jupiter ever took, and the team called it strategic rather than a cash grab.