
So, if you’ve been paying any attention to Solana lately, you’ve probably heard the name Jupiter. It’s hard not to. The protocol seems to be involved in just about everything over there.
It started a few years back with their main thing, the DEX aggregator. You know, the one that routes trades across different exchanges. That’s still a huge deal. But they didn’t stop. They’ve been expanding, or maybe just experimenting, into other areas ever since.
Another New Thing from Jupiter
This week, the focus is on something different: a lending service. They’re calling it Jupiter Lend. It’s their first official step into that specific part of the market, which is a pretty crowded space. But they’re not building it from scratch. They’re doing it by teaming up with another project, one called Fluid.
You might not know Fluid. It’s been a bigger deal on Ethereum, honestly. It flew under the radar for a lot of people, but it’s been doing some interesting stuff. The whole thing is a bit complex, but the basic idea is that it combines trading, lending, and borrowing all into one system that shares liquidity.
How This Fluid Thing Actually Works
This is where it gets a little weird, but stick with me. Normally, when you borrow money, the collateral you put up just sits there. It’s idle. On Fluid, that’s not the case. Your debt can actually be used to provide liquidity for their built-in trading platform.
So your debt isn’t just sitting there costing you money. It’s put to work. It earns trading fees, and those fees then help pay down what you owe. It inverts the whole idea of debt being a passive, draining thing. It’s kind of a strange concept, but it seems to be working for them.
And because everything is so connected, their system for handling liquidations is different, too. It’s less brutal. Instead of wiping out a position all at once if the market moves, it happens in smaller pieces. This means less drastic penalties for the borrower. They claim the slippage is really low, like a tenth of a percent.
What This Could Mean
This approach lets them offer loan-to-value ratios that are much higher than you typically see. We’re talking 90% or even 95%, which is pretty wild. For comparison, even the biggest lending platforms usually cap it around 70-85% for the safest assets.
It’s a risky model, perhaps. But the numbers so far are hard to ignore. On Ethereum, Fluid’s lending product has apparently seen over a billion dollars in active loans in under a year. That’s not nothing.
Now Jupiter is bringing that model over to Solana. It’s a gamble, for sure. But if it works, it could shake up how people think about borrowing. Or it might not. It’s one of those things we’ll just have to wait and see.