Solana’s Unstoppable Momentum 🚀Jito Labs CEO INTERVIEW

0:00 Institutions are 10 steps behind Solana. Today, we're going to break that down for you. We've got a special guest that's going to be joining us here in a minute. Before we get started, I do want to thank our sponsor today, and that is ProtonMail. You guys should be getting into security. And the reason is because ProtonMail is doing a fantastic job at protecting your privacy. This is the go-to place to get privacy set up for yourself.

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1:07 I want to start off with what is happening with the DTCC first, because remember, October has been the day or month that all of this has been promised in terms of its plans to launch tokenized securities via the DTC tokenization. If you guys will remember, we've had many people talk about this and what institutional access is gonna look like. I've got a clip that kind of rounds this up because now is the time guys, we're gonna take a look.

1:36 First of all, I would start with why do you call Canton an institutional chain?

1:39 That's what we think it is.

1:41 I don't understand where you call a chain an institutional chain. To be honest, I don't even know how you define an institution. In our first update of the day, JP Morgan successfully tokenized the Invesco NASDAQ 100 ETF. We participated in the DTCC's limited trade production event to evaluate the feasibility of using tokenized securities within a US-based CCP workflow.

2:13 For us, the opportunity is clear.

2:15 Thank you for sharing those insights.

2:17 And it's not just a case that that was a simple move from a wallet to another wallet.

2:22 Thanks, Tom.

2:23 So very much a real transaction and not a simulation.

2:27 This isn't a science project. These were real production trades, real assets and real value.

2:33 Is the perfect example of interoperability. Head down, carry on.

2:38 Okay, so listen, you guys probably know the inside joke on this one. We've often kind of jousted with Canton, simply just saying it's an institutional chain.

2:47 We get it.

2:48 So I wanted to bring on someone that is kind of bridging the gap For not only institutions, but maybe the broader spectrum of what's happening in the market, joining us now is.

2:57 Lucas Bruder, who is the CEO over at Jito Labs. How are you, Lucas?

3:00 I'm perfect. How are you?

3:02 Good, good.

3:03 So we've had a couple of things happening out there in the market. You can kind of see a global head of equities right there at DTCC now confirmed for the Solana Breakpoint Summit. So we've got DTCC speaking at the Solana event. Then, of course, you had this news come out, which was JP Morgan adding Solana as tokenized money markets. And you can kind of compare just the on-chain liquidity of what's happening around this. Immediately, Solana makes a splash. And I think this is good for Solana in general, Lucas. So when you kind of consider what's happening right now with the DTCC, where the potential is for Solana playing into this whole ecosystem, first of all, what's your.

3:44 Opinion on this right now?

3:46 Is this all positive for Sol or is this one of those things where we'll see competition start to rise?

3:52 Oh, it's all positive for Sol. There's a huge gold rush going on right now in tokenized equities, whether it's the DTCC, Backpack, Ondo, xStocks. There's just a ton of projects that are innovating and bringing more securities and assets that typically haven't been on blockchains onto blockchains. And if you pair that with the massive retail user base and institutional user base on Solana. It's really setting up for this next bull run. And I think it's that we are certainly very bullish on tokenized securities. And, you know, we're super excited to see where things go in this world.

4:32 You had App & Glow live on Solana. This is the, obviously now with the new finality on a global network like that. When you look at App & Glow and also Rotor, what kind of changes will this implement for Jito?

4:45 Yeah, I would say on JITO specifically, you can expect if you're using JTX, our trading platform, you can expect to see faster confirmation times. That's certainly the main impact that we'll see. Everything else is pretty much, you know, as it's been running, I would say that, you know, backing up Alpenglow is basically a complete consensus rewrite. So I believe it was introduced the first white paper back in March or so of 2025. And it brings the finality time on Solana down from 12 seconds to right around 200 or 150 milliseconds. And that rolled out, yeah, I think it was around Wednesday. And so the network's been cruising. There's definitely more upgrades and performance things to do to make it run even faster. Solana is moving.

5:36 The pace of innovation on Solana at the core level is just extremely fast, faster than any other network. If you compare it to Ethereum, they've mentioned these consensus changes and the roadmap's like four years. On Solana, it went from idea to in production on mainnet in about a year and a half. So it's just really cool to see that and all the other improvements that are happening on Solana.

6:01 Do you think that the kind of advancements that we've seen within Solana just in the last six months... was timing-wise, I think it might be really aligned real well for this next bull run. But more importantly, is this, you had mentioned goal rush before, is this a goal rush also for the developer communities and startups that are trying to, because I see so many projects now flipping over to Sol from other chains. How do you see that playing out over, say, the next 12 months?

6:32 It's only going to accelerate. And the cool thing about Solana is that The pace of acceleration at the core infrastructure level benefits every application on Solana. This year, I think we doubled block size from around 60 million to 100 million CUs per block. And we also took the slot times from 400 milliseconds down to 200 milliseconds. It works running with twice as big blocks. It's running twice as fast. We did Alpenglow, which took the finalization time down from 12 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Can you name any other network that's done that in that amount of time?

7:14 Nobody.

7:16 And there's even more stuff coming. So there's more improvements coming later this year that will increase the performance of Alpenglow. There's a SIMD to... increase the block size again. Maybe beginning of next year, beginning to mid next year, we will have essentially 4X the block size on Solana.

7:40 Okay. So Lucas, I got to ask you this.

7:42 With that kind of advancement, this seems as though, well, I want your opinion. Do you think Solana is now AI ready? Because this seems like it's got the capacity for it now.

7:53 For sure. Yeah. I think a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about here, I'm really focused on the tech, but zooming out, For users, this will just mean faster confirmation times, lower latency, lower fees. I had a tweet that I sent out like around a week or two ago comparing the making a trade of Sol USDC on JTX and Coinbase. And the JTX notification was faster. So Solana is already at this like Web 2 experience that you would expect confirmation times in less than 200 milliseconds.

8:27 And that's definitely going to benefit AI agents. I think they're going to want to go to the place that has the least amount of friction, the most amount of assets to trade, and that is Solana.

8:38 The more you utilize agents, the more you find out that this is actually good for, especially for trading. In integration on JITO, how close are you guys to be able to really see maybe an advancement in that area, AI agents trading within JTX?

8:57 Yeah, we definitely talk about it a lot. We are all very interested in AI integrations into JTX. I think the path there is still something we're trying to define. Coinbase, Robinhood, there's a few other platforms that have these types of like API or MCP integrations so that you can trade from, you know, Claude or ChatGPT or Grokbot. And I think that there's, I think it's still very early. I think it's, um, there was some platform. I can't remember what it was.

9:28 I think they said like one to 2% of their trading platform trading volume is coming from these agents, but I think it's only going to accelerate as they get smarter. People start to trust them more and basically like make trades for you while you're sleeping or while you're out playing with your kids or whatever it is. And just like, it's going to be really cool to see that. I'm super excited about that. And I think that uh salon is definitely the best place to do it the friction of getting capital on chain is super low so i think it's it's going to be a really good place for these agents to run.

10:06 You guys are are launching or it appears to plan to launch the mobile app here this uh this winter when you look at the performance of some platforms out there that have been very successful in launching these mobile apps. I mean, why not get this out faster? Like we need this now, especially with what's happening in this month in October.

10:27 How close are you?

10:29 Uh, we're very close. Um, I think the, uh, I will say that I have demos of an app and we're playing around with it. And the long part is the iOS application process. So getting Apple to approve the account, but, um, Yeah, we're super excited about that. We're moving as fast as we can. And there's some other features that we think are going to be key for this, especially when you start to... Right now, we're mainly targeting this Solana native, crypto native audience. They either have funds on chain or they know how to get them on. And when you expand out to this world and think of an app that my parents could use, there's a ton of usability things that we can do to make that even better.

11:13 So.

11:14 We're definitely focusing on that. And I would say the next like two months for JTX are just going to be massive. We've been working on a bunch of features. I think there's probably three or four main features that we're going to launch over the next two months that we think are going to be really big for the application.

11:31 Last time that you and I got a chance to talk, we were asking questions around the platform. And one of the things I was looking at is when you go into trade and within a platform right now. Back then, I was asking why not meme coins, and it looks like you've added the.

11:49 Stocks section here. So this is new.

11:53 And then also for just the UX side, or I should say the onboarding side. So when you want to start trading, obviously you've connected this with wallets, this now available on Phantom, Wallet Connect, Ledger, et cetera. But still, to your point that you just mentioned a second ago, you still have to go, if you want to bring cash into the system, you've got to go through some sort of centralized exchange.

12:15 So that's still a situation.

12:17 Any plans for solving that on-ramp issue in the near future?

12:22 Yeah, expect to see that shortly. Maybe, I don't know if this is live or it'll be released later, but you'll definitely see it soon.

12:31 Oh, okay. So it could be very close.

12:33 Another thing is when you look at some of the stocks that are out there trading on some of these open perp exchanges like Hyperliquid. CXMT is one that we track a lot just because of its impact on the global semiconductor industry. This is only available on Hyperliquid right now. Is there any plan of getting these kinds of stocks available in other places like JTX?

12:57 For sure. The main perps platform on Solana right today is Phoenix Perps. And I imagine they're tracking this pretty closely. I think we are super excited about perps. And right now in JTX, it's a spot experience. So you can long only spot no leverage. I think that being able to short and getting a wide variety of crypto assets and equities and commodities to be able to long and short is going to be super important to unlock the next kind of cohort of traders on JTX. So we're definitely thinking about how do we offer the best experience there to be able to long, short, go on leverage.

13:37 Lucas, what is.

13:39 Your take on this whole movement of anti-tokenization? You look at Wells Fargo into 20 other companies. I mean, this list seems to be just growing that they don't want their stocks trading on tokenized platforms. Is this something that you're concerned about? Is there anything that is an initiative that's underway by Solana or others that you know of that are trying to maybe educate these companies into understanding this?

14:06 Yeah, I think that we are certainly doing our part to educate these people. I think that there's probably a, I don't know what's going through their heads, but I imagine there's kind of a outdated take on blockchains from some of these companies. I launched, like there's JTO that's tradable on Solana. I want everyone to be able to access that. I want everyone to be able to access Sol or stable coins or whatever it is. And so if I'm the CEO of a public company, I want to get as many people trading these equities as I can.

14:42 I want more holders all over the world. Maybe they're not thinking about it like that right now, but they definitely will be in the future. And I think we'll see this flip where They are excited to tokenize stocks and excited to get it in more people's hands.

14:57 I just can't imagine some of these companies missing that. It just seems like it's a natural slam dunk for this, especially for growth and getting access to maybe a new audience of investors, which probably aren't as frequent in traditional trading mechanisms out there. Speaking of that, let's talk about DEXs.

15:15 Solana's largest PERP DEX now by volume is now merged.

15:19 What do you think? Is there.

15:21 possibly a new perps King on Solana, maybe in the wings.

15:26 Could this, could this, uh, be, be dethroned?

15:28 Do you think, or no, we'll see. There's a, in addition to the amount of competition at the equity side right now, there's a lot of competition at the perp side. So the one that you just mentioned, there's Phoenix perps, there's Flint trade, uh, which is started by a ex Gito employee. Um, And there's probably like five or 10 more that I'm not even aware of that are still very early. So I think the cool thing about Solana and perps is that you don't have on hyperliquid is that there is a lot of spot assets on Solana that you can use as collateral in these platforms if they support it. So I think Phoenix added spot soul as collateral previously, it was only USDC. And so That's the cool thing about Solana focusing on SPA is that

16:20 you'll have all these SPA instruments, whether it's crypto assets or equities, and you'll be able to use them as collateral in these platforms. So I think that is like the real benefit of building perps on Solana is that you can actually use the composability of having all these assets on one state machine and one blockchain and be able to use them across borrow lend, being able to use it in perps and anything else that you can think of.

16:50 Definitely on that point. Let's go back to AI for a second. Claude's getting ready to launch Duet. This is getting ready to go. The likelihood is we're going to see a lot more platforms integrating what's happening in AI. MCP Connection seems to be a foregone conclusion. What about with you guys?

17:10 Will you have an MCP Connector for some of these platforms?

17:13 We're definitely discussing it. We have debates internally. It's do you do MCP or do you do something in the application? There's definitely pros and cons to each one. But I think it's, as we were talking about earlier, I think that agents trading is inevitable. It's still really early. I think the reason it's not larger, I think, is probably some element of trust. So do I trust that if I say go buy $ 10 of SpaceX.

17:42 It's actually going to buy $ 10 of SpaceX or something else. Do I trust it to make trades for me on my behalf when I'm not there to approve it? So I think there's a massive trust element. I think that more and more people are trusting AI. I think that there's, you know, people that aren't in tech, they might have this like weird misconception about AI, that it's evil or whatever it is. But now with you have... grokbot you have the open ai one dot you have um this cloud one coming out yeah you have muse and facebook obviously has massive massive distribution across the world and so they're going to keep introducing llms and ai into everyday people's lives it will use uh there's alex wang interview

18:35 uh the guy that's kind of leading up the the muse efforts at meta talking about how Basically, it'll increase everyone's agency. So the AI will basically start to do more and more stuff on your behalf and people will start to trust it more. So I think there's definitely a massive opportunity here. There's a lot of companies taking shots on goal.

18:56 Okay, so let's jump over because I want to learn a little bit more about the JITO buybacks. When can we start seeing JITO buybacks? When is this happening?

19:05 I think it's going to happen pretty soon. I'd have to... I believe within the next few weeks, there's some tokens that are going to get bought back.

19:16 I'm looking at this just to kind of get, there's Jito Liquid staking right there. Still doing very well in terms of overall staking as a whole. When you look at that and the comparison of what we've seen with other platforms out there, some of those I'll go to one, of course, Ethereum staking. hitting an all-time high right here.

19:39 Solana activity is growing on Bitwise. But that kind of leads me to the bigger question, and that is when you look at bit mine, you know, with what, uh, Tom Lee is doing, what happens if he spins his guns over to Solana and says, Oh, maybe there's an opportunity here. What do you think that would look like in comparison to, uh, to where it's going right now?

20:01 Especially if, if you look at soul in.

20:03 General, that's an interesting question.

20:05 I Yeah.

20:08 I mean, how much do you know how much of the supply that he has? Is it like almost 5%?

20:13 Yeah, it's very close.

20:15 He's closing in on 5% of the supply for sure.

20:18 Yeah. I mean, that's just a massive supply. Yeah.

20:22 Yeah.

20:23 I don't know. It'd be interesting. I don't know if we've seen.

20:25 He said he was going to fix it there. That they weren't going.

20:29 To go above it.

20:30 Fixing meaning buying more?

20:31 No, they were going.

20:32 To lock it up and just say 5% is the max.

20:35 That's what they're going to do. Let it go to work.

20:38 My question is, I mean, BitMind is going to continue to try to figure out ways to innovate. You would think maybe there's an opportunity. He's been somewhat friendly to Solana in general. I just wonder if that'll be the way that they go. And I'm looking at just stake Sol right now on Joop. Right here, you can kind of see it continues to move. You look at staked Jito holding the variation, of course. I mean, who ends up winning the institutional staking out there in the market?

21:08 Who do you think is going to win this?

21:10 Yeah, I think that we will win this. I think Rebecca's been on the show a few times. She's a killer, killer lawyer. And we just have a lot of good relationships with these parties. I think There's definitely a lead from, I think Bitwise is leading the ETF right now. Very good team. We're pretty close with them. I think that we have the best chance of leading on the liquid staking side.

21:36 Why do you say that? Why do you say that? Give me some reasons.

21:40 Yeah, I would say that our go-to-market on the institutional side, so we've done deals with Coinbase and other large institutions. You can mint and burn in Coinbase and Anchorage and some other platforms. We have integrations into Falcon X. So like the place that these institutions are working on, like they're not going on chain to mint and buy these tokens.

22:06 They're working through a third party, a qualified custodian that has the security and has the regulations. So we're kind of like at their front door via these parties. And we're also having a lot of conversations and educating them on Solana and If you want to sell G2 soul first, you have to tell the story of Solana and why people should be bullish on it and then talk to them about G2 soul.

22:32 Yeah.

22:32 I would say that like, you know, it's a bummer clarity didn't pass, but there's been a lot of good news and good news coming out of the SEC and CFTC somewhere around liquid staking. And we're excited to take that to the partners and tell them about it and, you know, continue selling them on G2 soul.

22:52 Okay, that's a good answer.

22:53 I mean, because you're right, if they're comfortable with those mechanisms out there, those particular facilities, as we start to see those really participating, much like what Bitwise has done with leading the way here, that could be the blueprint for a lot of institutions, which would kind of lean into what you're talking about here in terms of JITO possibly winning this, or at least being one of the major providers of it. I want to jump over to Appenglow because there was another release recently just here recently on a thing called Quantum Glow, which is supposed to level up App & Glow in terms of post-quantum security that it could position as one of the leaders in becoming quantum resistant.

23:35 What are your thoughts?

23:36 Oh, for sure. I mean, we were talking about this earlier. App & Glow went from an idea to production, completely ripped out the entire consensus mechanism and replaced it in a year and a half. And so I think that Solana will continue to lead on the quantum-resistant encryption and signature schemes and all that. All that stuff's way beyond my pay grade. I don't fully understand it, but I trust the Alonzo team and Quentin and Roger and all the others working on it there that they will not only be able to solve it, but they will be able to make it extremely performant too. The amount of engineering...

24:19 like going on in Anza and fire dancer right now is world-class. This is not just like some random blockchain company that, you know, took some, took someone else's software and kind of like tweaked, tweaked it. This is like best in class engineering teams and they have shown the ability to move very fast here. So I don't even really think about quantum at all. Like those guys will handle it and, uh, not, not something to be concerned about with respect to Solana. I think for things like Bitcoin and potentially Ethereum, it becomes a much bigger concern because they are not moving as fast. Bitcoin is just like this, you know, kind of this like chunk of gold that just doesn't really change that much. And so

25:06 it'll be interesting to see if this lights a fire under them to actually do something or, you know, we'll see what happens.

25:15 I am looking at this, and I want to know if you agree. The last time we saw a pump in the market, it was post non-clarity. You have a major advancement that everybody's worried about Q Day already. If you get a hint that Solana has quantum resistance in the bag, this seems like this would be a natural evolution, especially from the institutional side, because of the connection that you see institutions trying to play into this as well.

25:43 That could be a major punch. which would, of course, pipe in retail as well. Would you agree or no?

25:52 For sure, yeah. Definitely agree there.

25:54 You're on top of that. Okay, all right.

25:57 I want to talk a couple of big things that are hitting the market, and some of you guys may not have heard.

26:03 What we're seeing with GTA 6.

26:05 This is Take-Two, the maker of it, reveals their in-game currency structure now for SharkBucks.

26:10 If this happens, what happens if.

26:14 This gets going. Do you feel like Solana is prepared for something like this? I know they're saying that they're, you know, they're going to probably put the, you know, the brakes on this in terms of expansion, but I just don't know. I feel like this is such a big opportunity for Take-Two in the gaming sector, which means you're going to have all these other games starting to follow suit.

26:35 What do you think?

26:35 Do you think Solana is prepared for that kind of move?

26:39 Yeah, I hope they launch on Solana. I don't know the specifics of it, but Solana can do tens of thousands of transfers per second. The top markets and AMMs on Solana are doing multiple hundreds of millions of dollars a day. So I think Solana is ready for it. And I hope to see this virtual currency launch on Solana.

27:01 I think it'd be pretty cool.

27:03 Yeah, I'm going to look at your, I'm looking right here.

27:06 Yep, there it is.

27:07 I thought I saw it on there. I was looking at your website. Well, there you go. It's trading right now. GTA 6 is trading as one of.

27:12 Your top stocks. So, yeah, that makes sense.

27:17 Other things that I want to hit on, because this brings in a very, I won't call it a touchy question, but it's something you have to think about.

27:25 You look at Uniswap. These guys are absolutely cooking.

27:29 You got 90% of all DEX activity right now on base and Ethereum, Robinhood chain. And they claim more chains coming soon. Look at this pump right here, Lucas. What if they come in and say, hey, Solana needs to be on here? Do you think they immediately, because most of the time they just take over these chains, at least on Uniswap.

27:50 What are your thoughts on that? What happens?

27:52 I don't think they have a shot at succeeding on Solana. I mean, hopefully Hayden proves me wrong.

27:57 Why, why, why?

27:59 So there's, there's kind of two main sources of trading activity on Solana. One is this like large cap, middle cap equities side. A lot of this is run by prop AMMs. The other side at the completely in the prop AMMs are like market makers that are, you know, making these markets professionally. You can think of them like order books on chain to kind of like simplify it a lot. The other end of the spectrum is meme coins.

28:28 And a lot of the meme coins are created on pumped off fun. So they actually are started on there and then they will migrate to radium and some of them migrate to Orca as well. And so like you kind of have, I don't think they're going to win at these markets that are super competitive, like solo USDC.

28:51 There's not a lot of volume that goes through the passive liquidity and you have to get in that. somehow so like pump's not going to switch to uniswap so like how are you going to get liquidity and volume onto the uh new decks it's really challenging i hope hayden proves me wrong if he comes to it uh but uh i'm just not not confident in their ability i think they are pretty focused on evm because you can kind of just like copy and paste your code across chains on Solana, you have to completely rewrite your code from scratch.

29:23 Well, you're right.

29:24 EVM has kind of been their focus. It's been their bullseye for quite some time. That would be hard to recreate, I think, in general, if Uniswap were to try.

29:33 To do it.

29:33 But it is an interesting possibility if Uniswap does take on Sol as a chain.

29:39 So it'll be something to watch.

29:41 Hey, Lucas, we're going to get you back on the show for sure as things roll out, especially when you launch your app. You got to come back on the show because we want to try the app, play with it and understand it because I'm still in between Jupyter and JTX. Right now, Jupyter is winning because that app is killer, bro.

29:59 We need the app. We need the app on JTX.

30:03 Yeah, we're working on it. We'll have a lot of unique things in there that no one else will have. So I'm excited about it, and the team's grinding to make it happen.

30:12 Can you share anything as far as just a nugget of what might be cool within the app?

30:21 Just give me one nugget.

30:23 Yeah, I think that our explore page that's coming is just going to knock everything out of the park. Insanely smart gigabrain data scientists that have been looking at the chain data for, they just stare at it and try to make it better and better. So we have some people really obsessing over what's going on on chain and being able to, right now when you use JTX, you have to show up with a trade in mind. Maybe you see it on Twitter, maybe you see it on some other app. And I think this is really going to pull people into the app because you'll be able to discover trade ideas and make them within 100 milliseconds.

30:59 That would be a big deal. Okay. All right. So that might be coming to JTA.

31:03 All right.

31:04 Well, we're going to be watching. We'll get you back on the show when that happens, okay?

31:08 Cool. Thanks for having me.

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