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Podcast Host / Announcer
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
Crypto 101 Host
All right, everybody, welcome back, all of you good, wonderful citizens of Crypt Nation. I hope you're having a fantastic morning, noon or night, wherever you are in the world, you are certainly in the right place because today I've got an incredible guest president of Jupiter, Xiao Xiaoju. Xiao Xiao, thank you for joining us here at the Crypto 101 podcast. And how are you doing today?
Xiao Xiaoju
I'm great. Pleasure to be here. Look forward to the conversation.
Crypto 101 Host
Yeah, I'm greatly looking forward to it. Jupiter, something that I've used plenty and very, you know, it's just a seamless experience. I like to, you know, connect it to the phantom wallet and there's a lot of great stuff going on. And so for our listeners, I hope that you guys are using Jupiter to some extent or have at least looked into it because this thing is awesome. It helps you get the best pricing across all of your Solana trades and so much more. But before we dive too much deeper into Jupiter and all the amazing things that you guys are working on across the entire crypto sphere, let's get you acquainted a little bit with our audience. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Xiao Xiao, how you kind of got into crypto, what your background was before.
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, of course. So I've been in this role I think over the last one or two months, so relatively new. But the journey into crypto and to Jupyter has been a long way coming. It has been sort of a blend of high level strategy as well as creative performance, I would say. I try to always bridge different worlds. And so over the last five years I was at kkr, one of the leading private investment firms in the world with about $700 billion assets under management. One of the pioneers of the private equity space. You know, I've been leading the global digital asset strategy while at KKR as well as, you know, working in the iconic TMT private equity team, working on some landmark deals, all like billion dollar revenue companies. And before that I, I worked for about a close to a decade at the Boston Consulting Group, one of the leading management consulting companies, essentially advising Fortune 500 companies on, on company strategy and, and challenging topics. But also on blockchain because back in 2016 I led some of the first blockchain projects that BCG did at the time. And so I had the pleasure to at the time worked together with De Beers, the leading diamond producer in the world, on actually building up a blockchain based asset tracking platform for natural diamonds to prove end to end provenance. And that was at a time when Ethereum wasn't even properly operational. And so we had to actually build a permission version, a private blockchain at the time, which they apparently still until today use to track their natural diamonds, which I think was probably one of the first use cases of blockchain. And through that I sort of fell down the crypto rabbit hole. Although majority of my work was focused on essentially building out new digital companies or scaling very large companies while at BCG and kkr in my sort of personal side, I've always stayed very much involved in the crypto side. Been an angel investor into many projects and funds and yeah, so that's how I got into sort of the blockchain space and, and then maybe like just one note also in a previous life I was actually a professional concert pianist. So be on stage. I played for George Bush Sr. And Gorbachev for the I think 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall when I was a teenager and played around the world on stages, et cetera. So I'm used to kind of switch context and challenge myself every couple of years into something completely different. And then now, yeah, I think it's a very big, very big jump as well from kkr, you know, one of the most prestigious sort of blue chip financial institutions on Wall street to kind of Jupiter, which you know, I essentially joined in one world to build out as the, as the leader in, on chain finance and so we can talk a little bit more about that.
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Crypto 101 Host
Yeah, there is a lot to talk about with tokenization and RWAs or real world assets. It seems to be the flavor of this year. Certainly it was also quite big last year. But I think what I see in terms of just the institutional adoption, if, you know, the conversations going on at Davos this, this past week, everybody wants in tokenization. I even saw Larry Fink say, I think it was just this morning or yesterday that we, you know, it's critical to get tokenization. And he, he kind of did allude to getting it done all on one blockchain, which I thought was interesting. I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think there's, you know, potential for, for many blockchains to proliferate and have interconnectivity. But that might be a different discussion, but wow. So kkr, you know, you had this incredible, you know, Wall street gig. You know, you could have retired there and worked this, you know, really, you know, predictable lifestyle. But you said, you know what, I'm.
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Crypto 101 Host
First into the unknown. And I think that's really cool. And, and I want to know a little bit about, I mean, there must have been some philosophical drive There must been some sort of spiritual connection to crypto in the future that I'd like you to kind of outline for our guests, because I think when they see these, you know, big Wall street moves come into this, you know, you know, the frontier of finance, it inspires them. And so we want to know a little bit about what inspires you about crypto.
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, I think, look, I think on a philosophical level, I always fascinated about this like, almost like parallel stack or architecture onto which like financial activities can be built, which empowers people and the users as opposed to kind of gatekeepers. Right. And you know, when I was at kkr, you know, I had the privilege of leading the Digital Asset Task Force. So we invested out of KKR's balance sheet into some of the leading crypto VCs at the time. So I had the pleasure of meeting most of the founders of the crypto VC space, I think five, six years ago. And we ended up investing in the likes of Dragonfly, PowerFi, Bitcraft, Joe Lubin's, funded Ethereal Ventures. So we were like large LPs in all of these funds, very close strategic partners. We shared deal flow and obviously expertise was very important from the early stage space. But then we also ended up kind of investing into more institutional digital asset leaders such as Anchorage Digital. Right. So Diogo and Nathan. So we let KKR led essentially the last round and did a lot of work there. But over time it was also clear that we deployed probably nine figures into the space, which was tiny for KKR's proportions, but relevant for the crypto space. But it never justifies more than a small part of actually my time. So when you, when you are essentially in a business like KKR, you always have your core investments, which are billion dollar Web2 or traffi portfolio companies or investments. And whether Those companies grow 3% or 5% matters always more than whether you get like a 5x or an 8x on a much smaller in crypto. And so the size mattered, mattered a lot more. And of course, you know, you're just talking about very different profiles in terms of growth as well as volatility, right. In private equity, basically more mature industries, you want to have predictability, right, because you have to underwrite an investment thesis. You have to project out financial cash flows for the next five years. And you're trying to be quite close right in your predictions, which is basically impossible in crypto because innovation still happens so fast at the fundamental stages, both, you know, technically as well as from a regulatory perspectives. It's Very difficult to predict how fast or how big new markets can literally spun up, right? Prediction markets didn't exist, you know, 12 months ago and you know, all the rage now, right? And so I think, you know, that that was sort of one part of the realization. The second part is just like by looking much more deeply into the evolution of digital asset space also became clear that I would say two main things have really changed or inflected in the last 12 to 24 months, which was not possible before. The one is just as you alluded to, right? The line between on chain and traditional finance has really been blurring in the last one or two years, right? Bitcoin, you know, really emerging as a, as a national corporate treasury asset. Stablecoins, not just a, you know, crypto settlement currency anymore, but increasingly a payment, a global payment and remittance rail, right? Also used and considered by banks and Legacy and Web2 players on chain venues such as Jupiter or Hyperliquid, you know, rapidly taking share from centralized exchanges. You can see that in the market share numbers, right? You know, literally growing from 0% market share about two, three years ago now to like close to 20%, right. Of the global spot or per volumes, which is very significant. And then new essentially on chain primitives like tokenization, tokenized assets or prediction markets literally popping up and reshaping how capital markets or information markets can function. Right. I would say the second observation is just the underlying crypto technologies very clearly growing up. And we are basically, I think in this fundamental shift where the value creation in the sector really is shifting from the infrastructure level to the application layer, right? And you can really see that block space used to be difficult to come by. It mattered where you actually built. But now I would say with the proliferation of layer one and two blockchains, those block space is becoming increasingly commoditized, right? They simply work. You don't have to think about them anymore. If you want to build a trading app, it just makes a lot of sense to do it on Solana or base maybe, right? But if you're trying to a little bit slower moving assets, Ethereum is your place. You don't have to think too much about it. They increasingly the cost and the speed really starts to work, right? And because of that, I think you're really seeing this new wave of onchain applications generating significant revenues and user adoption. And then that basically informed my thesis, right, that whether you invest your capital or time, the differentiation and the modes of value creation through businesses in crypto is shifting more and more. Towards distribution, brand user experience as opposed to, you know, how scalable is your blockchain, how fast is it or how cheap it is. Right. And I think all of this, I think culminating in this core belief of mine that what we now at Jupyter called on chain finance, not web three, not just crypto, right. There needs to be something new, not even defi. But really like on chain finance it's a fundamentally better way to do finance because you know, tradfi is huge, of course, and it kind of works, but it's still opaque, inefficient and built essentially on trusting gatekeepers like banks, like asset managers, like kkr. Right. And intermediaries. But really building on chain, fully on chain and crypto rails, which was not possible three years ago. Right. But now it is really empowers, right at scale, right? Open transparent rails, globally accessible from day one. You can bank the unbanked, you know, across the globe without having too many barriers. Self custody, self sovereignty, permissionless and trustless. Right. I think these are sort of the new pillars of what a financial new architecture could look like and the world simply doesn't know this yet. So I think a big part of what I'm going to do at Jupiter and with the team is to literally prove and communicate to the world that on chain finance is a better for everyday people. Right. And then there's different ways to go about it. So all in all, I think why I made that shift, I wanted to be on the front line of this fundamental shift and, and, and not just watching it from the old world.
Crypto 101 Host
No xia Xiao, that, that makes a ton of sense and it's really good to kind of get that perspective. But I want to move over towards the, the conversation around Solana because of course Jupiter chose to launch its home base on Solana. Not on Ethereum, not on Ethereum, L2, not on Bitcoin. And so kind of, you know, what was Jupiter's decision making process? And I know you came in a couple months back and Jupiter has been around for much, much longer, but I'm sure you understand, you know, sort of what the founders discovered and loved in Solana.
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, I think look at the time, there were many different L1s and L2s, right. And even until today, I think the Solana ecosystem, even today is still in a hyper growth phase. It's not about just testing infrastructure anymore. It's about true application level adoption and dominance. And so I think it just speaks volume to the fact that Solana is probably best thought of as a High frequency global financial coordination layer. Right. Because of its sub second finality and really negligible fees by now it is the only chain where you can build something like Jupyter, a decentralized trading venue or exchange that truly rivals the speed and feel and low cost of a centralized exchange like Binance or even New York Stock Exchange. Right. It's perfect for you know, high transaction, high throughput, sort of active finance. So things like you know, spot trading, perpetuals derivatives trading, high velocity stablecoin payments and composable defi loops where you need to move you know, capital across different protocols in a single transaction, et cetera which I think that is just by now I think proven out. Right. With that Solana its best position. It's where most of the on trend high velocity volumes are happening today. And then obviously Ethereum on the other hand side has a different philosophy with different technical specs, right. It's chosen a more modular path pushing users more towards the core Ethereum as well as various layer twos which is great for decentralization but it can create a more fragmented user experience. Right. And whereas Solana stuck to a more monolithic unified approach making it simply easier to kind of aggregate user experience and liquidity which is very important, right. If you want to have like really almost like web2 like experience. But yeah, I mean there's definitely a place for Ethereum, right. To really, you know I'm good friends with Joe Lubin, I admire what Vitalik and they've built really this global settlement layer for high value slow moving assets. So it's kind of the chain for TVL if you want. And then Solana is really becoming this global execution layer for the world's daily financial activity on chain. And yeah, I think that's sort of on the sort of infrastructure side of things but I think the user ultimately in the end the non crypto native user should almost not care, right. On which chain certain applications are built, right. It should not matter. And I think it's the job of the applications of the new sort of on chain protocols and super apps like Jupyter to kind of really build out a user experience to abstract away these kind of differences. And so for example at Jupyter where we are by far the largest trading venue by volume and user count on Solana. But, but we've been also building out the TVL side of the business as well which is more almost like B2B, slower moving, more sticky capital on chain, money market type of products like Jupiter Lend, which equally works technically on Solana and so ultimately I think the more variation, the more competition there is with great products that highlight different parts of the technical stack, the better it is for the user. Ultimately they can choose from great products and great experiences. And ultimately I think if we all have this mission around onchain finance, we should all go fight together, be allies, grow the market, grow the pie and show to users that doing things on chain simply can be better and you shouldn't be have to kind of trust centralized gatekeepers.
Crypto 101 Host
I love it and I completely agree with that ethos. And I know you all just launched a new stable coin, relatively new stablecoin Jupe USD and we want to understand a little bit behind why you created the stablecoin and what makes it different from others.
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, I think first of all, you know, stablecoin, everyone talks about stablecoins, everyone uses stablecoins but I think just to put it into some numbers, right, why this matters. I'm sure most people know this, but like today we have roughly 300 billion of total stablecoin supplies in the world. Right. They generate around 30 trillion in transaction volume per year. But then what that supply actually translates into is about, I think north of $10 billion of net profits for the key stablecoin issuers, which is tether and circle, which if you do the math is essentially between 3 and 4% of the total supply. Right. Which is the same as the underlying T bill yield. Right. That these companies have by issuing the stable coins and holding the underlying T bills. And I think if you really think long and hard about this in a target state, you shouldn't have to just keep all of this to the stablecoin issuers. And this is I think the fundamental challenge that we set ourselves right, that we, we wanted to kind of like create something where the issuers should not keep all of the interest from the assets backing these coins. But with Drew Busd, we're essentially utilizing tokenized BlackRock T bills through our partnership with Athena to flow that yield back essentially to users throughout our ecosystem of products. Right. And so we want to combine institutional grade safety with Solana's high speed rails and we want to kind of like, you know, create this like new generation of on chain first stable coins to evolve from simple trading tools into a global financial coordination layer that is, that should be objectively superior and more rewarding than traditional bank deposits or even like traditional stable coins.
Crypto 101 Host
Yeah, no, I mean stablecoins have absolutely been probably the talk of the town, I guess you could say in D.C. and, and in the broader Crypto market because of the Genius act that just passed here in the states. And so, so that was really big. And you know, our Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besant said that he thinks crypto stable coins can grow from, like you said, around $300 billion today in market cap to, oh, you know, to 10x to over $3 trillion over the course of, I think, the President's term. And so that would be big. And I'm sure Jupe USD would get a little share of that, but it seems like there's a big or a sizable share, not a little share, but it seems like there's a lot, a lot of conversation right now specifically with the Clarity act around this yield component. And you know, the, the, the, the coinbase side of the camp is now saying, we don't want this bill to happen because the banks are trying to block the yield getting to the end user, but the banks are hogging all the yield. So, and you've been behind, you've been on the, the other side of Wall street where you're, you know, you want the yield and you want the carry and all that kind of stuff. So, so how does this all kind of come to bear on Jupiter in regards to, you know, are you guys going to keep Jupiter yielding to the end user? Does it matter what happens with the Clarity act, or are you guys focused on just other jurisdictions? How do you kind of pair this?
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, I think, you know, traditional stablecoin issuers, they're sort of in the back end, right? They have to manage the reserves. There's a mint redeem facility, but they traditionally don't actually own the ecosystem or build out the ecosystem or the distribution layer for these stablecoins. That's why Circle's partnership with Coinbase has been the probably most important partnership right, in Circle's history, which you can also see in the financials. I think this is like one of the advantages, right? Like by essentially building and improving and building out this on chain super app that Jupyter is today and having essentially a native on chain, native stablecoin snapping fully into our product suite and essentially being able to create value back to the ecosystem and the users. Right. And so that is very difficult to replicate for pure stablecoin issuers, whether it's legacy or sort of newer ones. And it's also difficult to replicate for pure exchanges. Right. And we want to kind of build that synergistic flywheel to the benefit of the ecosystem. Right. And so as I mentioned, like, we strategically launched UPSD to solve this Major flaw in the current stablecoin market structure, right? While giants like Circle and Tether are very effective, it's very convenient. There's huge network effects. The yield generated from the treasury builds backing them flows entirely to the issuers, right? Not to the distribution partners, not to the users. Ultimately we want that value, right, to flow back to our users, not necessarily as yield generating stable coins, right? But we can, there's a lot of things that we can innovate on that we can experiment on to kind of like build that value into our ecosystem. So for example, right, we have designed DrupUSD today to drive kind of a flywheel of usage within our ecosystem. So users who deposit into the jupyter lend protocol, which is kind of our AAVE like, you know, lend borrow permissionless protocol that we've built on Solana into our super app. So users who deposit DrupUSD, you can very easily swap your USDC or USDT on our app, right, directly into DrupUSD. And if you then deposit the JupUSD into the Jupyter lens interface, you receive additional rewards, including a significant portion of the yield generated from the underlying BlackRock tokenized T builds, which is structurally an advantage, right? Like on Jupiter land, you have all kinds of different stablecoins, right? You can borrow against them, you can lend them out to get additional yield. But most of the stablecoins offer the yield that goes into the drup lend protocol come simply from know incentives or the difference between the lend and borrow rates essentially on it's a dynamic market, right? It's, it's set sort of automatically at any time. Whereas we can add a third layer of essentially yield to towards the basically deposited stable coins into our Drupal end if it's in denominated in drupusd, which is the underlying T bill yield, which should be up between 3 and 4% today and is backed by collateralized by BlackRock. And so structurally we should be able to give users who deposit drupUSD into druplend higher yield. I think a second, you know, very, you know, second source, I would say type of very exciting things that we want to experiment on and do to drive more usage and benefits to users is for example, today if you hold your drupusd in the Drupaland pool, you generate yield. If it was a centralized exchange or any type of, you know, CEFI world, you would have to, if you want to use your deposit that you earn yield on into any sort of trading activity, let's say limit order Right. You want to put a low limit order on Solana, right. In case the price drops, you don't know when it gets triggered. It might be triggered in two days, but it might be triggered in six weeks. Right. If you have your capital essentially in the limit order or let's say a prediction market's bet, right. You don't know when it actually cashes in. You don't traditionally get any yield on that while it's sitting there. We want to make that possible. If it's denominating jupusd, we can make that basically snapback immediately. So you don't even have to take the underlying drupusd out of the drupaland pool. You can just directly deposit a deposit token into the into the limit order and through that way, for whatever time you are essentially waiting for the limit order to get triggered, you actually continue to earn yield on your stablecoin. Right. And these are the type of defi composable, you know, I would say user experience innovations that we're very excited about because ultimately it's better for the users. Right. And there's no reason why this shouldn't work. And it only works because you're on an on chain trading venue like, like Jupiter.
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Crypto 101 Host
Yeah, no, it's awesome and there's so many exciting things going on it's hard to keep up and if we kind of shift gears from stablecoins to a little bit of the RWA and on chain initiatives, I know for instance Super State, you know some of the, the products that they offer are tradable through Jupiter Exchange and these are like tokenized Galaxy stock or tokenized T bills and all that kind of stuff. What, what's kind of your guys's mission and around tokenized equities and real world assets and what's on the product roadmap?
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, I think there's a huge future addressable market that we're very excited about. You know as the on chain super app I think Jupyter we welcome any sort of innovation on the supply side. Right. So tokenization of any kind of financial asset that makes it you know, tradable. You know you can do kind of financialization on top of the, the, the, the tokenized asset. As long as it's on Solana, I think it's automatically, you know, Jupiter becomes one of the main distribution and trading venues. We welcome any kind of innovation and additional supply that that comes here. I think it's kind of A marketplace, right. Ultimately users and demand will decide, right. And they will look at different parameters around, around, you know, redemption price costs, different things but, but ultimately we welcome any kind of tokenized assets. I think a lot of innovation now is going on and has to go on on the tokenized stocks side of things. I think, you know, a lot of X stocks, you know, tokenized equities already tradable. I think we're a major share of the trading volume that actually happens on Solana around tokenized stocks already. But it's still minuscule compared to actual stock trading volumes right on the primary liquidity venues and the brokers that essentially offer them. And so I think a lot still has to happen on the innovation side. It's not something that will be solved in 2026. I think it's a multi year journey. But I foresee kind of a much bigger innovation cycle where it's not just about tokenizing existing assets that have their primary liquidity venue off chain. Right. Like U.S. stocks today. But I think what's much more exciting over time is fully moving the capital formation process on chain end to end, right. Where you can almost like think about companies with real adoption and cash flows opt to not just go IPO and then later on and tokenization of the.
Crypto 101 Host
Stocks, but fully opt in the script.
Xiao Xiaoju
Flip the script and really go through the whole underwriting, the capital formation, the going public process, fully going it onto on chain processes and venues. And that way I think then problems that we still today are grappling with around, you know, how do you represent dividend rights, right in these kind of tokenized stocks or voting rights, right. And sort of governance rights which basically kind of leaves you with the derivative of just the price right. That is today traded. I think more and more of those will be solved over time. But I think it's just truly to move like significant volumes fully on chain, you have to really almost like flip the script and think end to end. Right. Capital formation. And then that's something that we're I think quite excited about alongside I think yeah, stocks obviously is one of the things that a lot of people are spending a lot of time on. But also I think, you know, credit is definitely something that there is a lot of movement on the institutional side. I'm having conversations with, you know, very senior people at very large tradfi institutions. I think there's a lot of effort and innovation ongoing to kind of tokenize already. You know, also private credit moving them on chain and I think once they are on chain, I Think there's like a series of things that you also have to, you know, solve through around, you know, KYC permissions requirements or redemption requirements. You know, by lowering sort of the threshold for investment thresholds, you ideally also want to have different redemption sort of periods. But I think these are some of the operational processes that can be solved. We can find ways around that. So I probably see, you know, credit almost like a little bit closer to where, you know, it could be stocks. As I mentioned, I think there's like a longer journey that we have to go through before on chain can be properly treated as the primary liquidity venue. And then. Yeah, and then over time I think it will be much harder around stuff that is not as unified like real estate. It will take much longer to kind of find proper solutions to kind of really do this at scale. But overall it's very clear, right? Stablecoins is just tokenized dollars, fiat currencies, tokenized commodities is already happening and then some of these other asset classes. Very clear that more and more of that will come on chain. And if you're the essentially distribution layer on chain, we welcome all kinds of innovation.
Crypto 101 Host
Awesome. So no, that makes perfect sense. And Xiao Xiao, I'm curious, just looking ahead for Jupiter, specifically in 2026, what is exciting you the most on the product roadmap and where do you think things are going to land here for Jupiter?
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, I think to be very clear, right, Jupiter is relentless at shipping new products. Nobody ships like Jupiter is kind of a proverb in the Solana ecosystem that people think we know. And just to illustrate that also like from history to presence and then we can talk about the future, which is like 18 months ago, Jupiter was simply a web only Dex aggregator on Solana. It was the largest Dex aggregator, but it was only web, right? And only Solana. It fulfilled a very critical function by stitching together the fragmented liquidity across the hundreds of Dexs. But it really made Solana very usable, right? Routing to the best place at any given time, best execution, best price, etc. Today we're way more than this, right? Today Jupyter is the largest on chain application platform on Solana. By users, by trading volume and by tvl. You can, you can basically say we are the largest on chain super app itself. I would like to sort of think about Jupiter, you know, and good analogy is Robinhood but fully on and probably pre Covid Robinhood because you kind of have a very loyal retail user base, right, that love the product and keep using it and assets that are being Traded are essentially long tail assets meme stocks at the time that was the claim to fame and that was also how we started most Solana trading if you want. But over time we really managed to build a whole flywheel around that initial use case. Right. So today we're the largest. We have the most diversified on chain business with 12 different revenue generating products and business lines and really growing. Right. Creating a flywheel for users, liquidity providers, token holders and partners. Jupiter generated you know, close to, you know actually more than $1 trillion of annual trading volume across spot and perps last year. You know, hundreds of millions of fees to our liquidity providers, hundreds of millions of net revenues that which is also going going into buying back the token for ex. We also built one of the largest ecosystem hubs on Solana with hundreds of partner integrations generating hundreds of millions of revenues for partners that are integrated with Jupyter and making it just super easy to integrate for developers to integrate into the Jupyter APIs largest perp Dex on Solana, largest Dex aggregator. We're growing very quickly our lending and borrowing protocol Juplant as mentioned, we have our own stablecoin. We're growing out a prediction markets venue as well. Some very exciting announcements coming as well. And then what many people also probably don't know, we are like one of the largest now, also one of the largest validators on Solana because we realized it was just important to not just build out the user experience but also really control the execution environment ultimately on that. So it's really a full stack team, a full stack company, not just on the front end layer but really down to the RPC execution as well. Want to simply have the elements together to offer the best possible experience to users on chain. Right. And so that's I would say in a nutshell what Jupyter is today. What if I think about the growth areas, right. And this will apply, you know, to 26 and some of those potentially also beyond. I see like a couple of very exciting growth areas which I think I and our team are especially sort of excited about. There will be a lot more news coming out. We keep announcing new things so there's some alpha in there, but I won't reveal too much. The first thing like, you know, if you think about how can you actually 10x something that already generates a large share of whatever happens in Solana today, right. So just from a market sizing perspective, strategy perspective, you have to think about different vectors, where the future growth can come from. And if I think about that Today, most of our users are desktop experience. A lot of developers are integrated through our APIs. But the one vector we believe is very important to actually onboard the next 10x of users that may not be advanced sophisticated trenchers or Solana warriors or traders. Right. Let's call them normies. I'm adopting the crypto here. How do we adopt sort of really onboard normies? It has to be by the mobile app, right? And so the mobile app as the delivery mechanism for the masses and really creating synergies across existing product from Flywheel. Like, you know, we have a lot of. I believe we're making a lot of progress on our mobile app already. It should be one of the best experiences on Solana, you know, the cheapest for sure, for any of your swapping activities and also the fastest compared to the peers. But we're just at the beginning, right? We're proving that out, but just by bringing some of the things that we already have on desktop, like perps trading. Right. We are the largest perps trading venue. It's today, not app native. Right. And so some of these things, I think, or prediction markets, I think we can get a lot better. But these are the type of things I think, just making it as simple and as comprehensive as possible for someone to come into the app and just immediately making sense of it and being able to kind of move part of their financial life onto the app. I think it's a 10x growth opportunity for sure. I would say the second one is onboarding new user groups not via just mobile, but via strategic partnership integrations. That's sort of more the institutional side, if you want. I think we can do a lot more. We've done incredible announcements over just the last couple months. Right. We integrated with Coinbase, with Robinhood, with Anchorage, as well as Uniswap even. They're all integrated with Jupyter's trading API to kind of offer the best of Solana assets and vaults to their users. And I think this is a very, very scalable way also for us to kind of like really onboard, you know, other ecosystem, you know, in crypto, but also like players outside of crypto itself, right. To kind of like offer all the beauty and variety of Solana products. I would say the third one is just further building out the onchain super app Flywheel through new product launches. What has happened just in the last couple of weeks is, for example, DrupUSD will bring back value to our users, but also prediction markets. Right. We launched beta with Kalshi. You know, there's like some big announcement in future also coming want to add more simply more variety and more depth to the prediction markets that are today already on Jupiter. And then fourthly, I would say if you think about just you doing a lot of trading already today on Solana, you make money, right? You kind of generate yield, etc. But what do you do with it ultimately? Right? So building some bridges toward, towards real world utility and real world value we believe will be also the next step which is very important. So we'll have some exciting announcement coming around the, around the payment stack as well which we call Jupyter Global. We want to offer better on ramp experiences there. There will be a payment card coming out, unified Jupyter IDs across all of our use cases and then very exciting. What we are working on is also just QR payment which will be a big I think unlock especially in emerging markets where you don't want to necessarily go through the costs of a credit card network. And even for unbanked merchants or small merchants or users in emerging markets, a lot of them are actually transacting today with QR payments. And we simply want to make your on chain asset balances usable also in those areas. I don't know in Vietnam, buying your noodles by just scanning a QR code via the Jupyter app and being able to pay from your on chain balances I think will be extremely powerful to kind of bring more utility to our users. And then yeah, finally I think if you think about the, the 10x growth vectors, there has to be something around Omnichain execution, right? We'll have some announcement coming there as well because as we spoke before ultimately on the question Ethereum or Solana, ultimately for crypto people are very tribal. We care a lot about on which chains transactions happen or don't happen. But ultimately for the Web2 user, you know, if you want them to kind of use crypto applications or on chain finance applications, they don't give up, you know, thing about on which chain it is. And so we do want to kind of like try to solve and abstract away as much of those kind of constraints as possible to kind of just offer the best of on chain markets towards those users regardless of the chain.
Crypto 101 Host
Well, it sounds like there's no shortage of things to do here for you in 2026. You guys are expanding, growing your user bases, growing the amount of touch points with your customers and and overall becoming just a great steward of the ecosystem by running validators, investing in builders. And so it's really Encouraging to, to hear from you all the amazing things going on at Jupiter. And so look, Chow Xiao, we, we greatly appreciate all the detail that you've been able to share with us here today on the Crypto 101 podcast. Last question is just in terms of where folks can go to download the app, where can people stay in touch on social media or what websites can we link in the show notes?
Xiao Xiaoju
Yeah, absolutely. I think the closing statement is just, just use Jupiter. Right, is the best way to kind of test out, give us feedback it's available. The mobile app I would say is probably the best if you are not already a Jupyter user. It's in Android as well as Apple stores. It's the best Solana wallet out there. You can do a lot of the stuff now. We abstracted away a lot of the usual pains that you have around it. Everything should be possible with QR codes. You can log in with your Google or Apple ID so you don't have to necessarily create a seed phrase. And then yeah, from app download to kind of having stablecoins in your wallet should take less than 10 seconds. I do this, I love onboarding friends and leaders in Tradfi and seeing just the surprise in their eyes. Right. That something like that is possible fully on chain and you shouldn't even care about whether it's on chain or not. Just the speed and the elegance of the UX should speak for itself. But there's still a lot to sort of work on. Yeah. And obviously follow our X account, Jupyter Exchange and LinkedIn as well. I started the LinkedIn blueprint for Jupyter just a couple weeks ago. Didn't exist but now we're live so we're trying to build that out on X. We're already one of the largest accounts out there. But I think, yeah, it's also important to show I would say the tratfire world that you know, we're serious and there's like a lot of cool stuff coming and people should take note.
Crypto 101 Host
I love it. No, that's incredible. Yeah, LinkedIn, that's something that most crypto folks aren't doing. But you know, coming from a hundred billion dollar fund, 700 billion dollar fund, you know, the importance of networking on LinkedIn. Look, Joshua, we really, really appreciate all the time that you spent with us here today and we hope to have you back on soon again to talk about some more big updates. And so you let us know when works and we look forward to hearing more updates in the future. Take care.
Xiao Xiaoju
Absolutely. Thank you. Very much. Speak soon.
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Hosts: Bryce Paul & Brendan Viehman
Guest: Xiao Xiaoju, President of Jupiter Exchange
Date: February 17, 2026
This episode centers around the accelerating trend of tokenizing real world assets (RWAs) on blockchain, examining Jupiter Exchange’s leading role on Solana. The conversation explores Xiao Xiaoju’s remarkable journey from legacy finance and consulting into crypto, the philosophy behind onchain finance, Solana's technological advantages, the innovation of Jupiter’s new stablecoin, and the future of tokenized assets. Listeners will gain deep business, technical, and philosophical insights on how onchain applications are shaping the next era of finance.
[01:30] Xiao Xiaoju’s Journey from Wall Street to Crypto:
[10:25]
[17:34]
[22:48]
[26:33]
[34:29]
[40:40] Product Evolution and Strategic Growth Vectors
This episode provides a comprehensive blueprint of how DeFi and tokenization—led by platforms like Jupiter—are evolving finance beyond today’s boundaries, with Solana as the technical backbone and user-focused innovation at the core.