“It’s a Genuine Edge” - Kash Dhanda Optimistic on Jupiter Lend’s Architecture

Jupiter’s orbit grew even larger last week, with the DeFi superapp adding a new vertical to its expansive product suite.

Speaking at Accelerate, Jupiter’s Kash Dhanda announced that DeFi titan was stepping into Solana’s highly competitive lending markets, bringing the Jupiter experience to one of the foundational pillars of onchain finance.

Speaking exclusively with SolanaFloor, Dhanda argued why Jupiter’s lending architecture could eclipse competitors and outlined his aspirations for the next wave of Solana DeFi.

Jupiter to Offer Solana DeFi’s Highest LTV?

Solana’s lending markets are fiercely competitive. Mercenary capital is the lifeblood of the onchain economy, with depositors rotating funds between apps with impunity in the search for the highest possible yield.

Confident in the protocol’s native architecture, Dhanda argues that Jupiter Lend will optimize capital efficiency and offer some of Solana’s DeFi’s best rates. The Cat Herder claims that Jupiter Lend’s “genuine edge” comes from its unified liquidity layer, market-leading LTV ratios, and low liquidation fees.

“Jupiter Lend actually has two layers. There's the liquidity layer, which has all the liquidity, which then can be used by any protocols that are built on top of it. Rather than having people either deposit in Multiply or in a traditional vault, in Jupiter Lend, you just deposit in the liquidity layer. And then we can use that in whatever way the rest of the market wants to use it. And so that leads to things like better LTVs.” 

Theoretically, having a unified liquidity layer affords the protocol greater flexibility, allowing Jupiter Lend to offer extremely competitive LTV ratios. With higher LTV, borrowers can maximize the capital efficiency of their collateral, essentially making Jupiter Lend a more attractive venue to leverage wealth.

“Our loan-to-value ratio on Sol, we're expecting to be about 90% versus on other platforms, where you see it at like 75%. For a borrow-lend market, that really matters. How good is your collateral, and how much can you get out of it?... If you want to use that as collateral, you'll go to a place that's going to allow you to get more mileage out of that collateral than not. So typically what you get when you have higher LTVs is it attracts more capital.”

When pressed on whether or not facilitating collateralized loans at 90% LTV was truly in the best interest of user safety, Dhanda gave a libertarian response. Remarking that opportunity is the crux of DeFi, Dhanda suggested that Jupiter didn’t want to hold users’ hands. Instead, Jupiter insists on giving users the option to make the most of the capital based on their risk tolerance.

“But I think that giving people the opportunity to use their capital in whatever ways they find most productive is really like the essence of DeFi, right? Is that we are not here to be school teachers to tell you this is what you should do and not do. We want to push the tech to the limits so that you can get the most value out of it, whatever that might mean to you.”

For the sake of comparison, Solana DeFi’s highest LTV ratios at press time are provided by RainFi, which offers up to 96% LTV on short-term, fixed-duration loans. 

However, given the indefinite duration of Jupiter Lend loans, it would be more accurate to compare its LTVs to similar applications, like Kamino Finance. Kamino currently offers up 80% LTV on open-ended loans in specific markets. 

Finally, Dhanda credits Jupiter Lend’s liquidation engine as one of the key factors enabling the protocol’s high LTV ratios. While rival money markets typically charge a liquidation fee of anywhere between 2.5%-10%, Jupiter Lend is slated to charge as little as 0.1%, giving borrowers more breathing room on their positions.

“Traditional liquidation engines will charge you somewhere between two and a half to 10%, typically, as the penalty if your collateral loses value. Because of the way that ours is designed... we can make that as small as 10 bps. [0.1%]”

Who’s Building Jupiter Lend?

Unlike the bulk of Jupiter’s products, which are either built in-house or acquired and absorbed into the growing DeFi super app, Jupiter turned to old friends to streamline the development of its lending product.

Despite its name and branding, Jupiter Lend is powered by Fluid, an EVM-based money market with over $2.2B in TVL. According to Dhanda, Fluid and Jupiter’s founding teams go way back. Fluid has been given the reins to build out Jupiter Lend’s architectural stack, with the platform’s distribution and operation handled by Jupiter.

“We actually, at an interpersonal level, have a lot of history with Fluid. Meow used to advise a company called Kyber, and Kyber was the first team to give a grant to Samyak and Sowmay, who were the founders of InstaDApp at the time, now Fluid… When we say that it's powered by Fluid, we mean that in a literal sense, that the Fluid team is the one building out the vast majority of the tech.”

While some might be concerned about whether Ethereum-first developers are sufficiently equipped to recreate secure protocols in a different virtual machine, Dhanda assures users that they’re in good hands. 

“They have full access to our team, and our team has been helpful on some considerations of things that are unique between Ethereum and Solana. It's not as if they're just going to deliver it to us fully wrapped one day and be like, ah, we'll just use whatever they give us.”

Despite not building out the architecture themselves, Jupiter is still involved in the development process. When it comes to security, Dhanda asserts that a profound understanding of DeFi primitives is as significant as their implementation.

“But the truth is learning how to code on Solana is not as hard as learning how to build great DeFi primitives, right? The hard part is conceptualizing how should the system work, and what should the architecture be, and then the actual language that it's written in. Whether it's Solidity or Rust, is more of an implementation detail.”

As expected, the protocol will be subject to audits from leading blockchain security firms, as with all Jupiter products.

“We're investing in multiple audits as we do with all of our programs… So it's not just a very smart team at Fluid looking at it, not just the very smart team at Jupiter looking at it, but also outside third parties who will confirm that it's safe and reliable to use.”

DeFi 3.0

Jupiter Lend is slated to go live in July 2025, adding a fresh layer of competitive spirit to Solana DeFi. With RWAs steadily migrating onchain, Dhanda and the Jupiter team are eager to see TradFi and DeFi intersect and introduce a new world of financial opportunities for previously excluded users.

“We're really excited about the new wave of assets that are coming onto Solana, whether that's from TradFi or elsewhere, and we're really interested in supporting a lot of those assets and enabling experiences that are not possible in traditional finance… It's those kind of unique use cases and value props that I'm really excited about. Where can DeFi unlock value for everyday people that the traditional finance system prevented them from being able to realize?”

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