The LSE Directory / Crypto exchanges
Jupiter is a decentralized finance platform built on the Solana blockchain, launched in October 2021 as a swap aggregator. Its core product scans liquidity across Solana's decentralized exchanges, including Raydium, Orca and Meteora, computes the lowest cost route for a trade (splitting an order across multiple pools or hopping through an intermediate token when that produces a better price), and executes it in a single transaction. The platform has since expanded well beyond routing: it now offers Jupiter Perpetuals (leveraged futures on SOL, BTC and ETH), Jupiter Lend (a lending and borrowing market), limit orders, dollar cost averaging tools, a peer to peer transfer feature called Send, and its own dollar pegged stablecoin, JupUSD, live since January 2026. Jupiter's specialization is aggregation and integration rather than running a single order book from scratch: it competes with single venue Solana DEXs such as Raydium and Orca, and with other aggregators, by routing across all of them to find the best execution, then consolidates that routing advantage into what it calls a "DeFi superapp" spanning trading, lending, payments and, as of February 2026, prediction markets. Its perpetuals product uses a pooled counterparty model: every leveraged trade is taken against JLP (Jupiter Liquidity Pool), a single basket of SOL, ETH, BTC and stablecoins, rather than matching individual counterparties, and JLP holders earn a share of the platform's trading fees in return. The platform is non custodial and permissionless: users connect a wallet and trade directly on chain, with no account creation or KYC required for the core products, positioning it against custodial centralized exchanges as much as against other DEXs. It has also acquired complementary infrastructure, including the SolanaFM block explorer and the Coinhall analytics platform, to bring more of the Solana data stack in house. Jupiter was founded in October 2021 by a pseudonymous developer known publicly as Meow, together with co-founder Siong Ong. The JUP governance token launched in January 2024 via one of the largest airdrops in Solana's history, distributing the first of four planned annual tranches from a 10 billion token total supply. By early February 2026, Jupiter reported total value locked of roughly 2.35 billion dollars, more than 1 trillion dollars in trading volume over the prior year and over 3 trillion dollars in lifetime volume, according to figures reported by CoinDesk. The platform had been bootstrapped and profitable without outside capital until that same month, when ParaFi Capital made a 35 million dollar strategic investment, Jupiter's first external funding, settled entirely in JupUSD with an extended token lockup. Separately, Ben Chow, a co-founder associated with both Jupiter and its sister project Meteora, resigned from Meteora in February 2025 after the collapse of the LIBRA memecoin he was linked to; Jupiter stated at the time that no one at Jupiter or Meteora had committed insider trading or other financial wrongdoing. In February 2026, alongside the ParaFi investment, Jupiter announced a partnership bringing Polymarket's prediction markets to Solana through the Jupiter app. Jupiter Lend, launched in August 2025, crossed 2 billion dollars in total value locked by May 2026, helped by an isolated USDe lending market that Bitwise Asset Management seeded with more than 260 million dollars that same month.
