Jupiter Lend: How Fluid's Revolutionary Architecture is Transforming Solana DeFi

The Solana DeFi ecosystem is about to witness a significant transformation with the launch of Jupiter Lend, a new borrow-lend protocol built through a strategic partnership between Jupiter, Solana's dominant decentralized exchange aggregator, and Fluid, one of Ethereum's most innovative DeFi protocols. This collaboration represents more than just another lending product—it signals Jupiter's ambitious vision to become a comprehensive financial platform capable of competing with traditional finance giants.

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In a detailed conversation on the Lightspeed podcast, Kash Dhanda, the "cat herder" at Jupiter, and Samyak Jain, co-founder of Fluid, revealed the intricacies of their partnership, the technical innovations powering Jupiter Lend, and their shared vision for the future of decentralized finance. The discussion illuminated how two teams with deep roots in different blockchain ecosystems are combining forces to push the boundaries of what's possible in DeFi.

The Genesis of an Unlikely Partnership

The collaboration between Jupiter and Fluid emerged from a relationship that predates both protocols' current forms. Samyak Jain and Meow, Jupiter's pseudonymous founder, first connected approximately seven to eight years ago when Jain was just 18 years old. At that time, Meow served as a mentor figure, helping Jain and his co-founder navigate the nascent cryptocurrency industry. This foundation of trust and shared history proved essential when discussions about building a lending protocol began.

Jupiter faced a strategic decision when considering how to enter the lending market. The team could either develop internal expertise over many years or partner with established experts who had already mastered the complexities of lending protocol design. As Kash Dhanda explained, "Some of the team have been working on it for seven or eight years at this point, so it takes a long time to get there." Rather than attempting to replicate years of specialized knowledge, Jupiter chose to collaborate with what they considered the absolute best team in the space.

The partnership structure reflects the unique nature of this relationship. According to Dhanda, the deal operates on a 50/50 revenue share between Jupiter and Fluid—a detail first reported by Blockworks research. Perhaps more notably, the arrangement is "almost entirely based on trust," with minimal formal paperwork behind the agreement. This unconventional approach relies on the decade-long history between the two teams rather than traditional legal frameworks.

Why Fluid Couldn't Simply Launch on Solana

A natural question arises: why didn't Fluid simply deploy its protocol directly on Solana? Jain addressed this candidly, explaining that Fluid is fundamentally an "Ethereum-centric protocol." The challenge of managing two distinct communities with different cultures and occasional rivalries would have created insurmountable obstacles. Growing a unified brand across such diverse ecosystems, Jain noted, "just won't go well."

However, Fluid's team remained eager to expand their innovations to additional platforms. Jupiter provided the perfect vehicle for this expansion—a trusted partner with established distribution and community presence on Solana. Through this partnership, Fluid's sophisticated architecture could reach Solana users without the complications of direct deployment.

This arrangement also explains why Jupiter didn't pursue an outright acquisition. Dhanda acknowledged that Jupiter could likely afford to acquire Fluid from a purely financial standpoint, but Fluid had no interest in such an arrangement given their success across multiple chains. Instead, the joint venture structure allows both parties to benefit while maintaining their independence and respective strengths.

Understanding Jupiter Lend's Core Advantages

Jupiter Lend introduces several significant improvements over existing Solana lending protocols, addressing pain points that have frustrated DeFi users across the ecosystem. The platform's advantages break down into two primary categories: simplicity for lenders and superior terms for borrowers.

For lenders, Jupiter Lend eliminates the complexity of choosing between multiple pools with varying APYs. Traditional lending protocols force users to select specific pools and actively manage their positions to capture the best yields. Jupiter Lend's "earn page" automates this process entirely. Assets deposited into the protocol automatically route to the highest-yielding opportunities across the entire system—whether that's a particular borrow vault, a multiply strategy, or another yield-generating mechanism.

"Your assets will automatically find the highest source of yield across the entire protocol," Dhanda explained. This automation means lenders can "rest assured" they're always earning optimal returns without constant monitoring and rebalancing. In DeFi's fast-moving environment where rates fluctuate rapidly, this represents a meaningful improvement in user experience.

The Revolutionary Liquidation Engine

At the heart of Jupiter Lend's superiority for borrowers lies what the team describes as a "100X improvement in the liquidation engine." This isn't marketing hyperbole—it represents a fundamental restructuring of how liquidations work at the protocol level.

Traditional lending protocols impose significant liquidation penalties when borrowers' positions become undercollateralized. These penalties exist to incentivize liquidators to participate in maintaining protocol health, but they come at substantial cost to borrowers. Fluid's architecture dramatically reduces these penalties through a completely reimagined approach to liquidations.

This improvement has cascading benefits throughout the system. Better liquidations enable the protocol to offer higher loan-to-value ratios (LTVs) with confidence, since the system can efficiently manage positions that approach liquidation thresholds. Higher LTVs mean borrowers can extract more utility from their collateral—a crucial advantage for capital efficiency.

Jupiter Lend also features isolated pools for each borrow-lend product, meaning risk is compartmentalized rather than pooled across all assets. Unlike traditional pool-based models where problems with one asset can affect all users in that pool, Jupiter Lend's architecture ensures that your position remains insulated from issues affecting unrelated assets.

Universal Top-Up: A Game-Changing Feature

Among the numerous improvements in Jupiter Lend, Dhanda highlighted "universal top-up" as perhaps the most innovative user-facing feature. Each borrow position in Jupiter Lend receives its own unique URL, enabling collateral deposits from any wallet—including wallets belonging to other people entirely.

This seemingly simple feature addresses a significant pain point for sophisticated DeFi users who often operate across multiple wallets. When a position approaches liquidation, the friction of switching wallets, navigating to the correct interface, and executing transactions can mean the difference between saving a position and losing it. With universal top-up, users can add collateral from their phone wallet to a position managed from their laptop, or even ask a friend to deposit emergency collateral on their behalf.

"If you're close to liquidation, that friction can be the difference between getting liquidated and not getting liquidated," Dhanda emphasized. This attention to real-world usage patterns reflects Jupiter's broader philosophy of prioritizing user experience above all else.

Fluid's Architectural Innovation: The Liquidity Layer

To understand what makes Jupiter Lend special, one must first understand Fluid's underlying architecture. Jain described Fluid as "an ever evolving DeFi protocol"—a tagline the team has maintained since day one that remains accurate years later.

Fluid's design places a liquidity layer at the foundation of the protocol. On top of this layer, developers can build an unlimited variety of financial protocols—lending, borrowing, decentralized exchanges, perpetuals, options, and virtually any other financial instrument imaginable. This architecture differs fundamentally from protocols that serve single purposes.

The genius of this design lies in how protocols built on Fluid contribute to each other's success. When Fluid launched its decentralized exchange, it became the second-largest DEX by volume and fees on Ethereum within just three months. This rapid success wasn't magic—it resulted from the synergies between Fluid's money market and its exchange. Jain explained that "Fluid DEX got 10X better because of Fluid money market and Fluid money market got 2X better because of the DEX because of how they can share liquidity with each other."

The protocol now hosts the deepest pools for correlated pairs on Ethereum, surpassing all competitors. This depth stems directly from Fluid's superior cost of capital, which itself results from the unified liquidity architecture.

Smart Collateral and Smart Debt: Financial Instruments That Never Existed

Fluid introduced concepts that simply didn't exist in DeFi before their creation. "Smart collateral" and "smart debt" represent genuinely novel financial instruments that expand what's possible in decentralized finance.

Smart debt is perhaps the more revolutionary concept. Traditionally, debt represents pure liability—something you pay interest on with no offsetting benefit. With smart debt on Fluid, your borrowed position can actually generate yield. Your debt can be traded upon by other market participants, and you earn a share of the resulting trading fees.

Jain illustrated with a concrete example: "If you're paying 5% borrowed rate and you're getting 2% trading APR, then your effective borrowed rate becomes 3%. If the trading APR is 6%, then you're getting 1% to borrow." This means borrowing can sometimes cost effectively nothing—or even generate positive returns for the borrower.

Smart collateral similarly transforms how deposited assets behave within the protocol. Every dollar deposited on Fluid works harder than on competing protocols because it serves multiple purposes simultaneously. This multi-functionality dramatically improves capital efficiency across the entire system.

Launching With Substantial Incentives

Understanding that new lending protocols face inherent reluctance from users who have settled into established platforms, Jupiter and Fluid are launching with aggressive incentive programs. Dhanda confirmed that "more than $2 million in incentives" are immediately available, with "substantially more coming in over time."

These incentives aren't merely marketing expense—they represent a calculated investment in allowing users to experience the protocol's genuine advantages. With superior liquidation mechanics, higher LTVs, and automated yield optimization, the team believes users who try Jupiter Lend will recognize its advantages and remain engaged after incentives phase out.

The incentive pool draws from multiple sources: both Jupiter and Fluid are contributing, along with various partner protocols. This coordinated approach ensures that early depositors will find rates that are either the highest or very close to the highest across every major asset category.

JLP: The Cornerstone of Solana DeFi

Any discussion of Jupiter's lending ambitions must address JLP—the liquidity provider token for Jupiter Perps. Dhanda described JLP as "the cornerstone of Solana DeFi" and, on a personal note, "my favorite token in the entire ecosystem."

JLP represents an index of major crypto assets (currently SOL, BTC, and ETH) plus stablecoins. Holders of JLP earn 75% of all trading fees generated on Jupiter Perps, resulting in yields that fluctuate between 10% and 50%—currently sitting around 29% APY. This real yield, as opposed to inflationary token rewards, has made JLP extremely attractive to investors.

The token has grown to represent approximately $1.7-1.8 billion in value, making it the single deepest liquidity pool on Solana. Professional investors have developed sophisticated strategies around JLP, particularly the "delta neutral" approach where they hold JLP while shorting the underlying assets in equivalent proportions. This allows them to capture the trading fee yield while eliminating directional exposure—a strategy that has become the dominant play for liquid crypto funds this cycle.

Other DeFi protocols, particularly Kamino, have built significant businesses around JLP-related products. Jupiter intends to capture more of this activity with Jupiter Lend. As Dhanda noted, "If you trust JLP, Jupiter is right there in the name. You probably want to use the same plan."

JLP Loans: A Jupiter-Exclusive Product

Jupiter recently launched "JLP loans," a product that demonstrates the unique advantages of building lending natively within the Jupiter ecosystem. This feature allows users to borrow against their JLP directly from the JLP pool itself, accessing the approximately $500 million in USDC held within the pool.

Because Jupiter controls the underlying liquidity, they can offer borrowing rates that would be impossible for competing protocols to match. "That is something only we can do," Dhanda stated, "because we have access to the underlying liquidity." This represents the first of what will likely be many Jupiter-exclusive integrations that competitors simply cannot replicate.

However, Dhanda was careful to emphasize that Jupiter isn't attempting to monopolize JLP-related products. The team has consciously avoided strategies that would limit JLP usage on other platforms or add unnecessary friction. "Solana DeFi is pretty fucking tiny right now relative to TradFi," he acknowledged, arguing that the goal should be growing the overall ecosystem rather than capturing market share from competitors.

The Aggregation Play: Jupiter's Core Strategy

Understanding Jupiter's lending ambitions requires understanding the company's broader strategic vision. Jupiter operates on an aggregation model—not just aggregating DEX liquidity, but aggregating user attention and trust across all DeFi activities.

This approach draws from "aggregation theory" as articulated by technology analyst Ben Thompson. The core insight is that companies aggregating consumer demand can eventually commoditize suppliers. Jupiter has successfully aggregated massive user attention on Solana, building what Dhanda described as "an extremely loyal and vocal community" that demonstrates remarkable stickiness.

With this user base established, the question becomes how to create additional value for existing users. Lending emerged as an obvious opportunity. The pattern has repeated successfully before—Jupiter's perpetuals exchange wasn't a natural extension of a DEX aggregator, yet it rapidly became the number one perps platform on Solana. Portfolio tracking followed a similar trajectory.

"The main goal is like, is this net additive and does this actually keep people coming back time and time again?" Dhanda explained. By expanding the range of activities users can accomplish within Jupiter's ecosystem, the protocol increases engagement while creating new revenue streams.

Solana's UX Advantage

The discussion illuminated a philosophical distinction between Solana and Ethereum that extends beyond technical performance. Dhanda argued that Solana's lower transaction costs attract a fundamentally different user base—one that demands superior user experience.

Ethereum's high gas fees create a natural filter, selecting for more sophisticated users with larger amounts of capital. These users can tolerate complexity because the stakes justify the effort. Solana, by contrast, serves "the everyday chain"—accessible to anyone from experienced traders to complete newcomers.

This dynamic makes user experience paramount on Solana. The success of both Jupiter and Solana as a whole stems largely from relentless focus on making things "even easier, even easier, even easier for users." Jupiter Lend continues this tradition with features like automated yield routing, simplified deposit interfaces, and the universal top-up functionality.

Competition: Goldman Sachs, Not Hyperliquid

Perhaps the most striking perspective shared during the conversation was Jupiter's view of its competitive landscape. Rather than focusing on other DeFi protocols as primary competitors, Jupiter positions itself against traditional finance giants.

"What we're really competing against is like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Coinbase and Robinhood and everyone else that's out there," Dhanda stated. This framing illuminates why Jupiter views its current product suite as merely a foundation rather than a completed offering.

Finance encompasses far more than trading and lending. Payments represent a multi-trillion dollar market where Jupiter has only nascent presence through its mobile app and send functionality. Insurance constitutes another massive opportunity that DeFi hasn't adequately addressed. The team envisions eventually offering every service currently provided by major financial institutions.

The Convergence of Perps and Spot Markets

Jain offered a provocative prediction about the future structure of DeFi markets. He argued that the distinction between perpetual futures and spot markets will eventually collapse as cryptocurrency markets mature.

Traditional finance developed separate perpetual and spot markets partly because capital movement was heavily restricted. Creating synthetic exposure through perpetuals was necessary when actually acquiring and transferring underlying assets proved cumbersome. Cryptocurrency, however, makes assets highly liquid and transferable, potentially eliminating the need for separate market structures.

"Perp is like creating a virtual asset," Jain explained. "The asset doesn't have to be there—just assuming the asset. But crypto makes all the assets so liquid, then the difference between spot and perp will slowly start to converge and sort of merge."

This perspective informs Fluid's development roadmap. The team is exploring architectures that would allow spot traders and perpetual traders to utilize the same automated market maker, effectively doubling fee generation for liquidity providers while unifying previously fragmented markets.

Fluid's Expansion Roadmap

Beyond Jupiter Lend, Fluid maintains an aggressive development schedule. The protocol plans to launch DEX V2 within two to three months, targeting non-correlated pairs like ETH/USDC and BTC/USD where it hasn't yet established dominance.

The DEX V2 will "superpower" smart collateral and smart debt further by enabling liquidity providers to create custom strategies on top of the base architecture. This flexibility should allow Fluid to penetrate markets currently dominated by other protocols while maintaining its capital efficiency advantages.

Jain also revealed several longer-term initiatives currently in ideation phase: power protocols, fixed-rate lending products, and credit-based protocols. The goal is to create every financial instrument that exists in traditional finance—and potentially new ones that don't yet exist anywhere.

"In three to five years, it will just be a massive, massive protocol," Jain predicted. The unified liquidity layer architecture enables this expansion without fragmenting capital across separate products, maintaining the efficiency advantages that drove Fluid's initial success.

Permissionless Markets: The Morpho Model for Solana

Among the planned expansions, Jain highlighted a "Morpho-like" model where users can permissionlessly create their own lending markets. This approach allows market participants to define their own risk parameters and create specialized markets without requiring protocol governance approval.

However, Jain noted an important distinction: while such markets would be permissionless, they wouldn't be entirely trustless in the way Morpho operates on Ethereum. The Jupiter/Fluid team maintains ownership over the underlying liquidity layer, meaning they retain certain controls even as market creation becomes permissionless.

This tradeoff between permissionlessness and trustlessness reflects a practical consideration. "If you're trusted enough by the industry, [trustlessness] isn't a big factor," Jain argued, pointing to Aave's position as the largest DeFi protocol despite maintaining similar governance controls.

The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

Both Jain and Dhanda expressed conviction that DeFi remains dramatically undervalued relative to its potential. Jain recalled predictions from seven years ago about DeFi reaching $100 million in total value locked—a milestone that seems quaint compared to today's tens of billions.

Looking forward, Jain projects DeFi becoming a "trillion dollars industry, probably tens of trillions of dollars industry" within three to five years. This growth will come from two directions: more users coming on-chain directly, and traditional financial institutions integrating DeFi as backend infrastructure.

The latter possibility presents particularly intriguing opportunities. Traditional finance cannot easily replicate DeFi's automated liquidity management, liquidation systems, and capital aggregation. An institution wanting to offer borrowing against diverse assets would face enormous complexity building these systems internally. Integrating with DeFi protocols provides turnkey solutions.

Jain offered a concrete example: borrowing against stock holdings. Currently, retail investors cannot borrow against their Tesla shares the way Elon Musk can against his massive holdings. DeFi could enable this service relatively easily once tokenized securities become widespread. Traditional institutions could offer this frontend service while relying on DeFi protocols for backend infrastructure.

Institutional Integration: The Backend Play

The path to mainstream adoption may run through institutions rather than around them. Coinbase's borrow product, built on Morpho's infrastructure, demonstrates this model already working in production. Users interact with Coinbase's familiar interface while DeFi protocols handle the underlying mechanics.

This hybrid approach could accelerate adoption without requiring massive behavioral changes from end users. Someone borrowing through their bank app wouldn't need to understand anything about liquidation mechanisms or smart contracts—they'd simply see a straightforward loan product while DeFi handles the complexity invisibly.

The implications extend beyond convenience. DeFi's automated systems enable services that traditional finance cannot economically offer. Liquidity management that would require dedicated teams at traditional institutions operates automatically through smart contracts. This efficiency could ultimately expand financial services access to populations currently underserved by traditional finance.

Jupiter's Path Forward

Despite launching a comprehensive suite of products, Jupiter's team views the current state as merely a foundation. Payments remains an obvious expansion area where Jupiter has only begun exploring through its mobile app. Insurance represents another massive market that will eventually move on-chain.

Dhanda articulated an ambitious standard for evaluating opportunities: examine what services major banks provide, then consider which will eventually migrate to DeFi. "Go to JP Morgan's website and look at every one of their divisional leads," he suggested. "This is probably something that's going to be coming into DeFi at some point."

This comprehensive vision explains why Jupiter chose to partner with Fluid rather than acquire a smaller team or build internally. Lending represents just one component of a much larger ambition, and having world-class partners for each component matters more than maximum ownership stake in any single piece.

Technical Excellence as Competitive Advantage

Throughout the conversation, both teams emphasized technical excellence as their core differentiator. Jain expressed confidence that Fluid has "probably the best developers and most technical team to build any kinds of complex applications or innovate or bring into the industry something new."

This technical foundation enables innovations that competitors struggle to replicate. The smart debt and smart collateral concepts required mathematical and algorithmic breakthroughs that took years to develop. The unified liquidity layer architecture emerged from deep understanding of how DeFi protocols actually operate at scale.

Jupiter similarly built its position through technical excellence—pioneering aggregation algorithms, developing the JLP model for perpetuals liquidity, and consistently shipping improvements faster than competitors. The partnership combines these complementary strengths: Fluid's protocol architecture expertise with Jupiter's user experience focus and distribution capabilities.

The Solana DeFi Ecosystem's Evolution

Jupiter Lend's launch represents another step in Solana's evolution as a DeFi ecosystem. The chain's high throughput and low costs have attracted significant trading activity, but lending has developed more slowly compared to Ethereum's established protocols.

Bringing Fluid's battle-tested architecture to Solana addresses this gap. Users gain access to innovations previously available only on Ethereum, while Fluid's technology reaches a new user base. The partnership model could serve as a template for other cross-chain collaborations that expand capabilities without fragmenting communities.

The competitive dynamics on Solana will likely intensify as Jupiter Lend launches. Kamino currently dominates lending on Solana, having built substantial business around JLP and other assets. Jupiter's entry with sophisticated technology and aggressive incentives will force existing players to innovate or risk losing market share.

Looking Ahead: The Five-Year Horizon

Both teams expressed expansive visions for the next five years. Jain envisions Fluid protocols serving every conceivable financial need, from basic lending to exotic derivatives. Dhanda sees Jupiter evolving into a comprehensive financial platform competing with global banking giants.

These visions share a common assumption: DeFi will capture an increasing share of global financial activity. The combination of automated efficiency, reduced intermediary costs, and expanded accessibility creates fundamental advantages over traditional finance. The question isn't whether this transition happens, but how quickly and through what channels.

For Solana specifically, having world-class lending infrastructure removes a significant barrier to broader DeFi adoption. Users no longer need to choose between Solana's performance advantages and Ethereum's DeFi sophistication. They can access both through protocols like Jupiter Lend that bring the best of both worlds together.

The Trust Foundation

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Jupiter-Fluid partnership is what it reveals about relationships in crypto. Despite involving substantial revenue sharing and ongoing collaboration, the deal operates primarily on trust built over eight years of personal relationship.

This arrangement would be unimaginable in traditional finance, where legal documentation governs every aspect of business relationships. Yet it may prove more resilient than paper contracts. Aligned incentives, shared history, and mutual respect create commitment that survives changing circumstances better than legal obligations.

The cryptocurrency industry's compressed timelines—where eight years represents an entire epoch—have produced these dense networks of trust among founders who've built together through multiple cycles. Jupiter and Fluid's partnership demonstrates how these relationships can create value for users by enabling collaborations that formal corporate structures would make impossible.

Conclusion

Jupiter Lend represents far more than another lending protocol launching on Solana. It demonstrates a new model for cross-ecosystem collaboration, brings battle-tested DeFi innovations to a new user base, and signals Jupiter's ambition to become a comprehensive financial platform.

The technical foundations—Fluid's liquidity layer architecture, smart debt and smart collateral, and 100x improved liquidations—provide genuine advantages over existing alternatives. Combined with Jupiter's proven ability to acquire and retain users, the partnership positions both teams for significant growth.

Most importantly, the launch continues Solana's maturation as a DeFi ecosystem. World-class lending infrastructure removes barriers to adoption and enables increasingly sophisticated financial strategies. As both teams emphasized, the current state of DeFi represents only a fraction of what's possible. Jupiter Lend provides essential infrastructure for that expanded future.

Facts + Figures

• Jupiter Lend launches with a 50/50 revenue share between Jupiter and Fluid, confirmed as accurate by Kash Dhanda
• Over $2 million in launch incentives are immediately available, with substantially more planned over time
• The liquidation engine represents a "100X improvement" over existing protocols, resulting in dramatically lower liquidation penalties for borrowers
• JLP (Jupiter Liquidity Provider token) currently has approximately $1.7-1.8 billion in total value locked
• JLP currently generates approximately 29% APY from trading fees, with historical range between 10-50%
• The JLP pool contains approximately $500 million in USDC
• 75% of all Jupiter Perps trading fees flow to JLP holders
• Fluid became the second-largest DEX on Ethereum by volume and fees within three months of launching Fluid DEX
• Fluid DEX V2, targeting non-correlated pairs, is planned for launch within two to three months
• The partnership between Meow (Jupiter founder) and Samyak Jain dates back approximately seven to eight years when Jain was 18 years old
• The partnership operates almost entirely on trust with minimal formal paperwork
• Fluid plans to begin token buybacks on October 1st, pending community feedback on their forum post
• Jupiter Lend features isolated pools for each borrow-lend product, eliminating cross-asset contagion risk
• Each borrow position has a unique URL enabling "universal top-up" from any wallet
• Jupiter positions itself as competing against Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Coinbase, and Robinhood rather than other DeFi protocols
• Jain predicts DeFi will become a "trillion dollars industry, probably tens of trillions" within three to five years
• Coinbase's borrow product is built on top of Morpho, demonstrating the institutional backend integration model

Questions Answered

What is Jupiter Lend and how does it differ from other Solana lending protocols?

Jupiter Lend is a new borrow-lend protocol built through a partnership between Jupiter and Fluid that launches on Solana with several unique advantages over existing options. For lenders, the platform automatically routes deposited assets to the highest-yielding opportunities across the entire protocol, eliminating the need to manually select and manage positions across different pools. For borrowers, the protocol offers a liquidation engine that is 100X better than competitors, resulting in significantly lower liquidation penalties and enabling the highest LTVs in the industry. Each borrow-lend position exists in an isolated pool, meaning problems with unrelated assets cannot affect your position, and unique URLs for each position enable "universal top-up" from any wallet.

Why did Jupiter partner with Fluid instead of building lending internally or acquiring a lending protocol?

Jupiter chose to partner with Fluid because the team wanted to work with the absolute best expertise in lending protocol design, which would take many years to develop internally. As Kash Dhanda explained, some of the Fluid team members have been working on lending for seven to eight years, representing knowledge that cannot be quickly replicated. An acquisition wasn't viable because Fluid is already extremely successful across multiple chains and had no interest in selling. The partnership structure, operating on a 50/50 revenue share basis, creates aligned incentives for both parties to continue innovating together. Importantly, the deal operates primarily on trust built through the eight to ten-year relationship between Jupiter's founder Meow and Fluid's co-founder Samyak Jain.

What makes Fluid's technology architecture unique compared to other DeFi protocols?

Fluid's architecture features a unified liquidity layer at the foundation upon which unlimited protocols can be built, including lending, borrowing, decentralized exchanges, perpetuals, options, and any other financial instruments. This design allows all protocols built on Fluid to share liquidity, meaning each protocol contributes to the success of others. When Fluid launched its DEX, it leveraged the existing money market's liquidity to become the second-largest DEX on Ethereum by volume within three months. The architecture also enables novel concepts like "smart collateral" and "smart debt," where borrowed positions can actually generate yield through trading fees, potentially reducing effective borrow rates to zero or even negative. This means every dollar deposited on Fluid serves multiple purposes simultaneously, dramatically improving capital efficiency.

What is smart debt and how does it benefit borrowers?

Smart debt is a novel financial instrument created by Fluid that transforms debt from a pure liability into a potentially productive asset. With smart debt, your borrowed position can be traded upon by other market participants, and you earn a share of the resulting trading fees. For example, if you're paying a 5% borrow rate but earning 2% in trading APR from your debt being traded, your effective borrow rate becomes only 3%. If trading activity generates 6% APR, you would actually earn 1% while borrowing rather than paying any interest at all. This concept never existed before Fluid created it and represents a genuine innovation in DeFi that enables entirely new use cases and user bases who benefit from dramatically improved capital efficiency.

How does Jupiter view JLP's role in the new lending product?

Jupiter describes JLP (Jupiter Liquidity Provider token) as "the cornerstone of Solana DeFi" and Kash Dhanda personally called it his "favorite token in the entire ecosystem." JLP represents a $1.7-1.8 billion asset that currently generates approximately 29% APY from real trading fees rather than inflationary token rewards. Jupiter has already launched "JLP loans" which allow users to borrow against their JLP directly from the $500 million in USDC within the JLP pool—a feature that only Jupiter can offer because they control the underlying liquidity. The team expects significant JLP-related activity to migrate to Jupiter Lend from competing protocols, though they emphasized they won't artificially restrict JLP usage elsewhere, preferring to grow the overall ecosystem rather than capture share from competitors.

What is Jupiter's ultimate vision for the platform beyond current products?

Jupiter views its competition as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Coinbase, and Robinhood rather than other DeFi protocols, reflecting ambitions far beyond current product offerings. While Jupiter now offers trading aggregation, perpetuals, lending, a launchpad, and portfolio tracking, the team sees these as merely a foundation. Payments represents a multi-trillion dollar market where Jupiter has only nascent presence. Insurance and reinsurance are explicitly mentioned as future opportunities, though with no short-term launch plans. The standard for evaluating opportunities is to examine every service division at major banks and consider which will eventually migrate to DeFi. This comprehensive vision explains the partnership model with Fluid—having world-class partners for each vertical matters more than maximum ownership of any single piece.

How do Samyak Jain and the Fluid team view the future relationship between perpetual futures and spot markets?

Jain believes the distinction between perpetual futures and spot markets will eventually collapse as cryptocurrency markets mature. Traditional finance developed separate markets partly because capital movement was heavily restricted, making synthetic exposure through perpetuals necessary. However, cryptocurrency makes assets highly liquid and easily transferable, potentially eliminating the need for separate structures. Jain stated that "the difference between spot and perp will slowly start to converge and sort of merge." Fluid is actively exploring architectures that would allow spot traders and perpetual traders to use the same automated market maker, effectively doubling fee generation for liquidity providers while unifying previously fragmented markets. This convergence represents a fundamental shift in how DeFi markets could be structured.

What incentives is Jupiter Lend launching with to attract initial liquidity?

Jupiter Lend is launching with "heavy incentives" designed to overcome natural reluctance toward new protocols and allow users to experience the platform's genuine advantages. Over $2 million in incentives are immediately available at launch, with "substantially more coming in over time" from both Jupiter and Fluid as well as various partner protocols. The team stated that launch rates should be either the highest or very close to the highest across basically every asset category users would want. These incentives represent a calculated investment in user acquisition, with confidence that users who experience the superior liquidation mechanics, higher LTVs, and automated yield optimization will remain engaged after incentive programs conclude.

Why did Fluid need Jupiter to expand to Solana rather than launching directly?

Fluid could not launch directly on Solana because it is fundamentally an "Ethereum-centric protocol," and managing two distinct communities with different cultures and occasional rivalries would create insurmountable obstacles. As Samyak Jain explained, growing a unified brand across such diverse ecosystems "just won't go well." However, the Fluid team remained eager to expand their innovations to additional platforms and viewed Jupiter as the perfect vehicle—a trusted partner with established distribution and community presence on Solana. Through the partnership, Fluid's sophisticated architecture reaches Solana users without the complications of direct deployment, while Jupiter gains access to battle-tested lending technology without years of internal development.