Hi all, happy Friday!

In today's Top of Mind section, we break down why JupLend is the only billion-dollar money market growing YTD and what Jupiter's superapp strategy may tell us about the next generation of DeFi moats. 

The Solana Ecosystem continued to push higher, with broad-based strength across its DeFi stack. The move coincides with Lightspeed, the Blockworks and Solana Foundation investor relations platform, going live this week.

It’s been a quietly strong week for the DeFi complex. Lending (+8.5%), the Ethereum Ecosystem (+8.3%) and DEXs (+3.8%) all posted solid gains. AI (+13.4%) and Solana Eco (+12.9%) led all sectors, but the more interesting signal may be the breadth of Solana DeFi outperformance rather than the magnitude of any single name.

Traditional benchmarks were muted by comparison. The Nasdaq 100 (+0.56%) and S&P 500 (+0.50%) were largely unchanged, while gold (+1.32%) and BTC (+1.09%) grinded higher. 

Drilling into the Solana Eco components, the story is less about any single outlier and more about how many names participated: META (+9.8%), JUP (+8.9%), JITO (+8.7%), RAY (+8.0%) and PUMP (+7.7%) all posted strong single-digit gains as the DeFi layer of the Solana stack bid broadly. 

Notably, ORCA surged ~73% this week on a short squeeze and strengthening protocol fundamentals: Nansen’s NX8 Index routing rebalancing through Orca’s Whirlpool pools and the 30% fee allocation to the DAO treasury for buybacks, turning rising volume into direct token demand.

In addition, Helium followed its monster quarter ($5.2 million revenue, 53% QoQ surge in carrier offload, and record 2.53 million daily users) with an ~60% price surge this week, fueled by strong onchain fundamentals. 

The Solana ecosystem's strength coincides with Lightspeed going live this week. Built by Blockworks with the Solana Foundation, the platform gives institutional allocators a single surface for diligence. 

Crypto has long suffered from fragmented data, inconsistent reporting, and materials built for crypto natives rather than institutional decision-makers. Lightspeed closes that gap with IC-ready research, standardized protocol metrics, and communication channels between teams and allocators, giving the marginal institutional buyer of Solana tokens fewer reasons to sit on the sidelines. 

— Sam

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Don't miss the institutional gathering of the year — this March 24−26.

JupLend: A case study in Jupiter’s cross-sell advantage

Money-market deposits and active loans have historically correlated with crypto prices. Even as RWAs account for a growing portion of collateral on these venues, a significant share of deposits remains tied to crypto majors (BTC, ETH and SOL), with strong demand for LST looping strategies on both Ethereum (e.g., wstETH/WETH) and Solana (e.g., jitoSOL/SOL). From a cyclicality perspective, headline metrics across most money markets are down YTD, alongside prices and decreasing demand for leverage.

As seen in the chart below, among money markets with over $1 billion in deposits, JupLend stands out as the only protocol posting positive YTD growth. What’s driving this resilience?

While SOL-denominated collateral (naked SOL and LSTs) has fallen materially in dollar terms, growth in stablecoin and JLP deposits has largely offset that decline. The chart below shows Jupiter’s JLP and stablecoin deposits are hovering near all-time highs, with a combined value of ~$1.09 billion.

Unlike most money markets, JupLend is just a single (but growing) piece of Jupiter’s broader DeFi stack. Jupiter has positioned itself as a DeFi superapp, with the aggregator, perps, a mobile wallet, a trading terminal, and prediction markets. An underrated unlock is its ability to cross-sell products and recycle liquidity across the suite, similar to fintechs like Robinhood.

This advantage is starting to show up in JupLend’s deposit mix. Last month, Jupiter launched JupUSD, an Ethena whitelabel stablecoin backed primarily by USDtb. JupUSD has grown to ~$65 million in market cap, with ~85% of supply currently deposited in JupLend. More importantly, there’s a sizable pool of potential demand: over $350 million of USDC sits in JLP and could eventually migrate into JupUSD, creating a flywheel where Jupiter can both bootstrap stablecoin adoption and capture yield that it’s currently forgoing to Circle.

Notably, ~25% of JupLend’s deposits come from assets issued by Jupiter itself (JLP and JupUSD). This kind of vertically integrated deposit base is unique among major money markets and helps explain why JupLend’s deposits have been more resilient despite current market conditions.

Active loans on JupLend have also remained relatively stable, outperforming other money markets YTD. USDC and SOL account for >85% of borrows, with primary use cases including JLP and JupSOL looping — another example of the positive network effects from Jupiter’s vertically integrated stack.

Beyond deposits and loans, JupLend is hitting all-time highs across other metrics. Total open positions have climbed to a record ~51,000, and flash loan activity has seen a huge uptick recently. As seen below, Feb. 18 alone saw more than $5 billion in SOL-denominated flash loans. While the precise driver is unclear as of writing, plausible explanations include position refinancing, arbitrage flows, or liquidation activity.

JupLend’s metrics point to the bigger story: Jupiter’s “superapp” strategy is starting to show tangible benefits. In recent months, some people (including myself) have been concerned that expanding across too many verticals could stretch the Jupiter team too thin and dilute focus. But — credit where it’s due — the breadth of the stack is creating underappreciated synergies that are increasingly visible in onchain data.

Today, JupLend generates roughly ~$25,000 in weekly revenue (representing less than 2% of Jupiter’s total revenue), but that misses the point. The more important question is whether Jupiter’s superapp approach can keep compounding, turning distribution into sustained cross-sell opportunities, tighter liquidity loops, and a more defensible moat over time.

— Carlos

 1. RWA Lending: the road to $10 billion

Silvio Busonero argues that RWA lending is still small (~$1.6 billion, ~3% of DeFi lending) but steadily growing, with Morpho and Kamino leading the pack. He describes that getting to $10 billion+ hinges on four things: liquid secondary markets, standardized legal wrappers (like credit-style structures), flexible/zk-friendly compliance, and real distribution via neobanks and stablecoin apps. 

He thinks lending protocols are slowly turning into fintech backends, and that the protocols which best bridge onchain efficiency with TradFi constraints will be the next big DeFi growth sector, similarly to how stablecoins and prediction markets matured into clear PMF.

2. HIP-4: Making All Markets Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 proposal introduces fully collateralized “outcome” contracts that generalize prediction markets and bounded payoff options. These let users trade on any event or state of the world directly on the main Hyperliquid order book rather than in siloed venues.

Building on HIP-3 (which enabled permissionless perps, including RWAs like Nasdaq futures and gold), HIP-4 adds contracts that settle within predefined ranges or discrete outcomes, so markets don’t rely on continuous price oracles or liquidation mechanics in the same way as traditional perps. This design is especially useful for things like pre-IPO pricing or binary events, where perps today lean on fragile offchain reference prices. Instead, outcome contracts settle on the realized result, reducing oracle risk and adversarial “toxic” flow against market makers.