A feline-branded conference held in Istanbul this weekend gave away some of the future ambitions of Solana’s top swap app, Jupiter.
At so-called Catstanbul, Jupiter and its colorful founder known as meow made headlines for turning on protocol fees that will lead to token buybacks. It’s also launching a $10 million AI fund alongside AI agent upstart Eliza Labs as well as a multi-blockchain network that would expand beyond Solana.
But the most interesting announcement — to me at least — came when Jupiter said it had taken a majority stake in Moonshot, a memecoin app that Donald Trump directed buyers to use during his memecoin launch.
Jupiter’s killer feature is its swap interface, which routes user trades across DEXs to achieve the best possible price. For all intents and purposes, Jupiter is where users get the most bang for their buck when swapping one Solana token for another. 39% of Solana DEX trades go through Jupiter, according to a Dune dashboard, and Jupiter currently has no real competitor as far as DEX aggregation goes.
But Jupiter has been hinting at bigger ambitions for a while. In May, it announced its giant unified markets initiative which promised to bring all kinds of assets onchain and index them with Jupiter. But for all the talk of GUM, most Solana blockspace is still being chewed up by memecoins, so Jupiter took a majority stake in Moonshot.
Moonshot is a memecoin app that is easy for normies to use. It caught a considerable boost when the TRUMP memecoin’s website directed users to Moonshot, which rocketed the app to a stint at #1 on the App Store’s finance charts. It’s unclear whether the Trump team cut some sort of deal with Moonshot. A source at Jupiter also declined to comment on the terms of the Moonshot deal.
By acquiring most of Moonshot, which is focused on unsophisticated users, Jupiter now benefits from experienced and inexperienced memecoin traders alike. It also now collects fees on all that trading: In Istanbul, Jupiter announced that it would begin collecting a 0.1% fee on its default swap feature, which had previously been free. Half of these fees will go toward buybacks of the platform’s JUP token, which briefly surged in price. Moonshot also collects trading fees.
Plus, with Moonshot’s central role in the TRUMP memecoin launch, Jupiter may be getting not just a stake in an app but something much more important in these windfall days for crypto — a connection to President Trump.
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