Written by Mint Ventures

In the previously published "Gold Strength: Finding Long-term Investment Points to Cross Bull and Bears (2025 Edition, Part 1)", we sorted out and introduced several projects in the lending track, Aave, Morpho, Kamino, MakerDao, and Lido and Jito that pledge track. As a middle-class article in a series of articles, this article will continue to introduce projects with high-quality fundamentals and long-term attention potential.

PS: This article is the stage thinking of the two authors as of the time of publication. It may change in the future, and its views are highly subjective, and there may be errors in facts, data, and reasoning logic. All views in this article are not investment advice. Criticism and further discussions from peers and readers are welcome.

3. Trading track: Cow Protocol, Uniswap, Jupiter3.1 Cow Protocol

Business status

Products and mechanisms

Cow Protocol is a decentralized transaction aggregation protocol, and its core product is the decentralized transaction aggregator CoW Swap. The "CoW" in the name represents Coincidence of Wants, that is, using the matchmaking mechanism to directly match the needs of both buyers and sellers. CoW Swap uses batch auction matching (Batch Auctions) as a price discovery mechanism to summarize users' transaction intentions (order requirements) and perform unified liquidation in each block.

This mechanism allows direct matching of user orders without the need for traditional market makers or liquidity pools. When the two parties just want to exchange assets required by each other, the transaction can be directly traded, avoiding intermediate link fees. For parts that cannot be matched directly, CoW Swap then routes the remaining orders to a decentralized exchange (DEX) or other aggregators to obtain liquidity. This design minimizes slippage and handling fees, and allows all transactions sold in the same batch to share the same liquidation price through batch matching, eliminating price unfairness caused by order of order.

In addition, CoW Swap introduces Solver bidding machineSystem: Multiple third-party solvers compete to provide users with the best transaction execution plan, and the winner obtains the right to execute the transaction in this batch and bears the on-chain gas fees. Users only need to sign the order intention offline, no need to pay the winding fee by themselves, and no transaction costs will be incurred if they fail. This "intention matchmaking + solver bidding" model makes the user experience more friendly (no need to worry about gas losses due to transaction failure) and provides a certain degree of MEV (maximum extractable value) protection - since order matchmaking is carried out off-chain, solvers need to bid to return the MEV to the user, making it difficult for MEV attacks such as preemptive transactions to work.

CoW Swap is currently available on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Gnosis and Base.

In addition to Cow swap, another product of Cow Protocol is MEV Blocker, developed by partners such as CoW DAO, Beaver Build and Agnostic Relay. After a user switches the RPC of his wallet to MEV Blocker, his transactions will pass through a private searcher network (rather than entering Ethereum’s public memory pool, visible to all searchers, resulting in MEV attacks), blocking sandwich attacks and preemptive transaction attacks from the source.

* The process in which conventional transactions on the Ethereum network are packaged into blocks: After the user initiates the transaction, the transaction first enters the public memory pool; the searcher monitors the memory pool, looks for MEV opportunities, and packages the transaction into a bundle; the builder receives the bundle from the searcher and builds the block; the validator receives the block from the builder, performs verification and adds it to the blockchain.

Profit model

Cow Protocol's revenue sources are roughly divided into two categories:

1. The transaction surplus from Cowswap, the so-called transaction surplus refers to the amount of money Cowswap provides users with through its bidding network that saves more than the initial quote. Currently, Cowswap charges 50% of the transaction surplus on most networks, but the charge does not exceed 1% of the transaction volume.

In addition, for those external protocols (partners) that integrate Cow Protocol, Cow Protocol will draw 15% of the transaction fees incurred by the partner (the proportion can be customized but not exceed 1% of the transaction volume) as a service fee.

Finally, Cow Protocol will also charge the overall network transaction volume of some networks, such as Gnosis and Arbitrum, with the current charging ratio of 0.1% of the transaction volume (except for special trading pairs such as stablecoins).

2. The benefits generated by MEV Blocker are drawn from the benefits obtained by verifiers through MEV Blocker, with a ratio of approximately 10%.

In the revenue composition of the agreement, most of the revenue is contributed by Cowswap's transaction surplus, so the business data we are paying attention to will also be mainly Cowswap.

Business data

We will focus on two business data: Cow Protocol's transaction volume and protocol revenue.

Trading volume

Data source: Dune

As an emerging intention matchmaking agreement, CoW Swap has experienced rapid development in the past three years. The 2021 agreement is still in its infancy and the early trading volume is relatively small. Entering 2022-2023, Cow Protocol's business data begins to increase as the demand for MEV protection and efficient aggregation transactions in the DeFi field grows. In 2024, the volume of agreements rose further: monthly trading volume hit a new high at the end of 2024, with monthly trading volume close to US$7.8 billion in December 2024 and nearly US$6.9 billion in February 2025, far higher than previous years.

It is worth mentioning that CoW Swap is increasingly favored by DAO organizations and professional institutions for providing large-value, low-slip trading solutions. About one-third of DAO's on-chain transaction volume was completed in 2023 through CoW Swap, and by February this year, this proportion climbed to 79.5%

Data source: Dune

Protocol revenue

Data source: Dune

After entering 2024, Cow Protocol began to actively explore protocol revenue generation, conducted multiple rounds of revenue generation tests, and revenue also showed a steady trend of gradual growth month by month. January 2025 is the highest month of revenue (calculated in ETH count), and the monthly agreement revenue is 641 ETH, which is approximately $2.13 million based on the average monthly ETH price of 3328$. February revenue is 586 ETH, calculated at the average monthly ETH price of 2668, and the agreement revenue is approximately $1.56 million.

Protocol incentive

Data source: Tokenenterminal

Currently, the main expenses of Cow Protocol are Cow token incentives for Cow Protocol network solvers. Network solvers receive Cow token rewards based on the quality of the trading schemes provided by themselves (trading surplus provided to traders). According to Tokenenterminal, the expenditure on Cow token rewards in the past year was approximately US$7.4 million. The agreement token incentives for January and February in 2025 were US$858,000 and US$961,000, lower than the agreement revenue of US$2.13 million and US$1.56 million in the same month.

According to the 2024 project revenue and expenditure disclosed by Cow Protocol in January this year, the Solver token reward given in 2024 is approximately US$5.2 million without considering the development costs of the agreement, while the agreement revenue for the whole year is approximately US$6 million, and the revenue has exceeded the token incentive expenditure.

Competition situation

Cow Protocol's main battlefield is the field of decentralized transaction aggregators. In the early days, the field was dominated by 1inch, but the pattern began to diversify in the past two years. According to the latest data from The Block in March 2025 (UniswapX included), 1inch's market share has fallen to the top (on March 5, 1inch's Fusion feature was attacked, with losses of more than $5 million, exacerbating users' concerns about its security), ranking second with only 22.8%, while Cowswap surpassed 33.85%, ranking first for the first time in monthly data.

Data source: The Block

In addition to 1inch and CoW, the top five aggregators include ParaSwap, 0xAPI/Matcha (an aggregate interface provided by the 0x protocol), and KyberSwap and Bebop. These competitors each have a share of around 10% or less. Among them, ParaSwap and 0x have a long history and a stable user base. KyberSwap (agged for Kyber Network transformation) and Bebop launched by Wintermute have both recently acquired a certain incremental user base.

Overall, the competitive situation in the DEX aggregation track has not diminished, and new players have been emerging. Although CoW Protocol has become the new leader in this field, its status is not yet stable.

In addition to traditional aggregation trading products, two other competitors worth paying attention to are UniswapX launched by Uniswap, and UniversalX, a full-chain trading platform launched by Particle Network.

UniswapX

UniswapX is a cross-platform aggregation transaction feature launched by the Uniswap team in the second half of 2023. UniswapX essentially provides users with similar intent orders + filler mechanisms: users submit offline signed orders on the Uniswap front-end, and a third-party "filler" in the network (similar to Cow ProtocolThe solver role of the network) can take orders and trade for users on the chain.

The process is that the filler issues a quotation and enjoys exclusive matchmaking rights in a short period of time. If the transaction is not completed within a limited time, it will enter the Dutch auction stage and more fillers will participate in the bidding. This model is similar to CoW Swap solver bidding, both of which are off-chain matchmaking and on-chain settlement solutions. With Uniswap's brand and huge user base, UniswapX has quickly integrated into its front-end interface since its launch and launched the ETH network.

It is worth noting that the industry once questioned that UniswapX "plagiarized" CoW Swap's intention matching model. Voices including Curve official pointed out that CoW Swap has long created the solver model, and UniswapX is not the first. Despite the controversy, UniswapX still used the Uniswap ecosystem to gain considerable trading volume in a short period of time. At the beginning of 2024, its share in the EVM aggregation trading market once exceeded 10% (at that time, Cowswap's share was about 14%), but its market share gradually declined in the future. According to data disclosed by Cow Protocol in March this year, UniswapX's market share in aggregation trading was about 5.5%.

UniversalX

UniversalX is another highly-attracted new project, focusing on cross-chain aggregation transactions. Launched by Particle Network and launched at the end of 2024, the goal is to realize transactions of any on-chain assets without the need for cross-chain bridges. Its core concept is "chain abstraction": users can deposit assets of multiple chains into a unified on-chain account, and buy and sell tokens of any chain using a unified balance through UniversalX's platform. The platform will automatically complete cross-chain redemption and settlement behind it.

As a new entrant in the aggregator field, UniversalX entered the segment of cross-chain trading, which has a certain difference with projects such as Cow Protocol that mainly engage in single-chain aggregation. However, with the development of the multi-chain ecosystem, UniversalX may have a competitive relationship with Cow Protocol in the future. If Cow Protocol expands to more chains or provides cross-chain functions, it will enter the competitive field of UniversalX.

Cow Protocol's competitive advantage

Faced with fierce competition, Cow Protocol can rise and grow steadily. Its competitive advantage can be analyzed from both product and brand:

1. Products

· Technical and mechanism advantages of trading products: Cow Swap is the first protocol to apply batch auction matchmaking and solver competition to DEX aggregation, with a first-mover advantage. Its unique Coincidence of Wants direct matching mechanism can complete transactions without the need for traditional liquidity pools, reducing users' dependence on AMM pools and reducing slippage and handling fees. At the same time, the unified liquidation price mechanism avoids price exploitation caused by the transaction sequence, allowing heavy traders, especially institutional orders, to be traded at fair prices.

In contrast, although later UniswapX and 1inch Fusion borrowed similar ideas, there were differences in specific implementations. For example, CoW Swap adopts a sealed bidding once per block, and all plans are submitted at the same time and execute them at the best time to maximize the compression of the MEV space. This mechanism is believed to prevent injustice such as preemptive transactions than UniswapX's limited-time exclusive form filling and Dutch shoots.

· MEV protection and security: The dual-product structure of Cow Protocol trading service +MEV Blocker further enhances the MEV resistance capability of transactions, withdraws user transactions from Ethereum's public memory pool, and transfers them to Ethereum in batches by trusted solvers, effectively reducing the risk of MEV attacks such as running forwards and pinch attacks. In addition, the protocol has strict restrictions on the solver's quotation slippage and execution results, and mechanically compresses the space for miners and searchers to extract MEVs. These measures make Cow Swap one of the trading platforms that pays the most attention to user protection. Such MEV protection is extremely attractive for large-value transactions and DAO vault managers.

2. Brand

Cow Protocol is the first trading product to launch a batch auction matchmaking and solver competition mechanism, and combined with its anti-MEV product characteristics, its safety and cost-saving value proposition for traders are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. It has gradually become the first choice for large-scale traders in terms of mind and will not change easily. This kind of user habitBehind the habit is the accumulation of brand and reputation based on the product formation of Cow Protocol, which is also the source of profitability in the agreement.

1inch Monthly active users in the past year, data source: Tokenenterminal

Cow Protocol Monthly active users in the past year, data source: Tokenenterminal

Main challenges and risks

Rough competitive environment

left;">The competition in the aggregation trading track is fierce. There are old-fashioned projects such as 1inch, kyber, DoDo, and later there are new forces like Bebop, supported by Wintermute. In addition, products such as CEX and wallets are closer to users, with strong entrance and front-end advantages, as well as chain abstract concept products such as UniversalX, have been actively exploring product innovation in transactions and striving for higher user penetration. In the long run, their relationship with Cow Protocol is "competitive than cooperation". Therefore, although Cow Protocol's market share has surpassed 1inch and has jumped to the top, under such high pressure competition, it is not easy to maintain market share, and it will directly suppress the bargaining power of the agreement and users and suppliers (solvers), making it obvious contradiction between the two goals of "market share" and "protocol profit".

Market cycle

The depression of the overall market cycle will cause a shrinking overall trading volume and impact Cowswap's trading volume. There is no need to say more. Other trading products are also affected by this and will not be repeated in the future.

Binding with the EVM ecosystem

At present, Cow Protocol only provides services in the Ethereum ecosystem. If the Ethereum ecosystem does not develop as well as other public chains, it will naturally inhibit the development space of Cow Protocol. It will be mentioned belowUniswap also faces this risk, and the author will not repeat it again.

Value reference

COW Token

Cow currently has a total of 1 billion. According to Coingecko data, the current circulation ratio is about 41.5%, and there will be a token circulation inflation rate of 19.61% in the next year.

Cow's token use cases are currently mainly governance. As subsequent protocol revenue increases, token repurchases may be conducted. We have also tried to pledge Cow to reduce the handling fee rate.

Value

Value

From the vertical valuation compared with oneself, as business data continues to rise, Cow's FDV also hit a new high in this round (not considering the outlier caused by the extremely low circulation rate of tokens in the first month of the project's first issuance). The highest market value hit a FDV peak of 990 million at the end of December last year, and then ushered in a sharp decline, currently about US$280 million.

We compare Cow's PS value vertically through the multiple of FDV and the agreement revenue:

From the figure above, although Cow's FDV has shown an upward trend in the past year, with the increase in business revenue, its PS value still showed a significant decline, which is more cost-effective than before.

From the horizontal comparison of competitors, among comparable projects in the aggregator field, 1inch is the most direct benchmark. Considering that 1INCH does not have direct token value capture, and the protocol does not have stable and public protocol revenue. We mainly compare the ratio of FDV and transaction volume of the two protocols.

It can be seen from the above figure that with the decline in Cow's price and the rise in business data, its market value\trading volume ratio has been lower than 1inch for the first time since February 2019, and has a higher horizontal cost-effectiveness.

3.2 Uniswap business status

Core products

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum. Its main products currently include its DEX protocol (now deployed on the Ethereum mainnet and multiple extension chains) and the newly launched Unichain exclusive Layer 2 network.

The fee switch mode of the Uniswap protocol has not been turned on yet, so the protocol itself has no direct revenue in the past (but Uniswap Labs charges a 0.15% interface service fee for some token transactions in its official front-end).

However, Unichain, which was officially announced to be launched in November 2024, will subsequently obtain the fee sharing of the transaction sorter through pledging UNI, so as to directly allocate value to UNI holders without having to turn on the fee switch.

Business data

For Uniswap, the most important business data are transaction volume and Fee; for Unichain, we mainly focus on the number of active addresses on the chain, the main ecology, and the scale of funds on the chain.

DEX trading volume and Fee

Uniswap's trading volume and Fee, source: tokenterminal

Uniswap's trading volume has continued to grow with the development of the market, and has set historical highs of monthly trading volume in March and December of the past year respectively. However, as the market has cooled down recently, the trading volume has dropped significantly.

It is worth noting that Uniswap's Fee indicator has not yet surpassed the peak and sub-peak of the previous round, showing that the ratio of handling fees is declining as the cycle progresses, and the competition for LP is more intense.

Multi-chain data

Thanks to multi-chain deployment (currently covering 11 evm chains), especially Ba launched by Coinbasese, Uniswap's active users also hit a new high in October last year, reaching 19 million. The growth rate of this business data far exceeds the growth of transaction volume, showing L2's ability to introduce new users.

Uniswap's multi-chain distribution of monthly active addresses, source: tokenterminal

Among them, Base is the main force of active users, accounting for 82% of Uniswap's active users on all links.

Source: tokenterminal

However, in terms of transaction volume, Ethereum is still the main battlefield of Uniswap, with transaction volume accounting for about 62%, followed by Arbitrum's 23%, and then 8.4% of Base.

Source: tokenterminal

Unichain's business data has increased rapidly since it was officially launched in early February this year. The number of weekly active addresses in early March has reached nearly 120,000, and this data ranks 7th among all L2s, higher than well-known L2 projects such as zksync, Manta, and Scroll.

Source: tokenterminal

Unichain's bridged assets are still not high, currently only about US$14 million.

Source: tokenterminaIn terms of ecology, Unichain has listed more than 80 ecological projects, but most of the actual businesses have not yet been officially launched. Taking Defi as an example, in fact, in addition to Uniswap itself, there are currently only Venus (total deposit of 5.67 million US dollars).

Competition situation

Uniswap has still occupied the top DEX market in the EVM ecosystem in the past year, and its overall market share remains the first, but the overall trend of market share continues to decline. The following figure shows the market share trends of all DEXs in the EVM ecosystem (including all EVM L1 and L2).

Source: Dune

The second place is Pancakeswap, and the third place is Aerodrome, which is the head DEX of Bnbchain and Base (although Uniswap has also been deployed in these two chains).

Source: Dune

ETH, Bnbchain, and Base are also the three chains with the largest transaction volume of EVM ecosystem, which are consistent with the market share rankings of Uniswap, Pancake, and Aerodrome.

As for Unichain, due to its short launch time, its ecosystem is still relatively weak and is in the cold start stage of applications and funds. In addition to the good growth of active users, other business data are still very different from mainstream L2.

Uniswap's competitive advantage

Uniswap's competitive advantage can be summarized as:

1. Network effect and liquidity depth

The largest liquidity pool attracts the most traders, and vice versaHowever, more traders and trading volume attract more tokens to deploy liquidity here, forming a self-reinforcement cycle.

2. Stickiness brought by brands and user habits

Uniswap is the first project to promote the AMM model in the Defi field, with the highest brand (including popularity and orthodoxy) and reputation. It has a high mental placeholder in the minds of traders and liquidity deployers. Even now that Dex and various aggregators are very rich, many users are still accustomed to trading on the front end of Uniswap, even if it charges an extra transaction fee. Uniswap's brand also played an important role in building L2. It attracted many high-quality projects to be tested and joined by L2 at the beginning of its launch, and its user growth was also rapid.

3. Ecological location for multi-chain deployment

Uniswap has product deployment in most mainstream EVM chains and ranks in the top three in most chains. This aspect has set a foundation for Uniswap to defend its basic position in the multi-chain era, and also laid the foundation for Uniswap's subsequent multi-chain aggregation trading function, making it easier to achieve multi-chain liquidity interoperability.

Main challenges and risks

The fierce competitive landscape and the impact of new models

Although Uniswap still has certain advantages in terms of market share, on the one hand, its traditional Ethereum competitors such as Curve still hold their positions, on the other hand, Uniswap's breakthrough in other EVMs L1&2 was not smooth, and each chain has its own strong local tyrants to compete with it (Bnbchain's Pancake, Base's Aerodrome, Arbitrum's Camelot, etc.).

What is more worthy of attention is the challenges of various emerging trading models: RFQ protocol (Request-For-Quote) and batch bidding matching models are emerging. Projects represented by CowSwap allow market makers to directly quote, improve bulk transaction price efficiency, reduce AMM slippage and MEV, and are deeply favored by professional traders and whales, which significantly divert Uniswap's trading volume.

Although Uniswap later launched UniswapX with a similar mechanism, it has not slowed down the growth rate of projects such as Cowswap. In addition, products such as wallets and CEX, which have obvious front-end advantages, have also made efforts in trading scenarios, trying to enter the upstream of user behavior, so that Uniswap can only become a more passive "recipient" and face the cruel quotation competition.

Community governance is inefficient, and tokens lack value linkage

Investors who have been paying attention to Uniswap's governance forum for a long time will find that compared with other Defi projects with higher governance efficiency and better reputation (such as Aave), Uniswap's governance efficiency is very low, which is reflected in the slow speed, waste of resources, and insufficient focus on strategic indicators.

For specific examples:

1. The cost switch issue that the community is most concerned about has been discussed repeatedly for nearly 3 years, and there has been no results so far;

2. Provide various donations and budgets for various research and organizations that have little to do with Uniswap Polaris indicators (trading volume), but the results obtained have little help to the project.

The low level of community governance, as well as the indifference and drag on the value peg of Uni token value, obviously has a long-term negative impact on Uni's token price.

Value Reference

Since Uniswap has not yet obtained formal agreement revenue, and Unichain's Fee is so small that it is basically negligible compared with its market value. We use the ratio of Uniswap's market value to its Fee (PF) to compare valuations vertically and horizontally.

Source: tokenterminal

In contrast, Uniswap's PF in February this year was 6.77, which is at an absolute historical low. Since Uniswap issued coins, there are only 3 months with lower prices than this indicator in history, namely May-June 2022 (three arrows thunder), and 20April 24 (Altcoin Big Callback +Uniswap received the SEC's Wells Notice). In March, the indicator rose slightly to 7.26. Judging from this indicator, the market is currently obviously extremely pessimistic about the prospects of Uni tokens.

Source: tokenterminal

In contrast to the target horizontally, I chose Pancake and Aerodrome, which are also second only to Uniswap's market share. The reason why I didn't choose Curve is because in addition to DEX, it currently has the main business of lending, which is not very comparable to the first three.

From the PF indicators of the three, it seems that Uniswap's valuation is significantly higher than that of Pancake and Aerodrome. But we still need to consider two factors above this:

Uniswap does not provide any token subsidies, while Pancake and Aerodrome are still conducting higher-scale token subsidies, especially Aerodrome, whose token incentive value in February was as high as US$27 million (see the figure below)

Uniswap and Unichain, the second growth curve Uniswap has been better built. Although Pancake has also deployed multiple chains, the operation situation is far behind Uni, and Aerodrome is a single chain DEX

Overall, even considering the similarity between Uniswap and Pancake and Aerodrome businesses, its PF horizontal valuation comparison is less reference than that of vertical comparison.

3.3 Jupiter

Business status

Jupiter Starting from aggregation transactions and through continuous expansion and mergers and acquisitions, Jupiter has now formed a full-link layout around Solana on-chain transactions and has expanded horizontally toOther chains and ecology. The main products in the Jupiter system include:

· Main website self-operated trading products: including aggregation transactions (Instant), current orders (Trigger) and conditional orders (Recurring) transactions. They are the earliest products that Jupiter went online and the most used products. The number of transactions in a single day set a record of 57 million on January 20

Source: Dune

Source: Dune

The Trenches product on the main website, that is, the previous Ape.pro, the product form of ape.pro is specific product tools for Meme, which is consistent with the product form of typical meme trading tools such as Phonton/GMGN. However, at the end of February, after ape.pro was incorporated into Trenches, its product form was not much different from the aggregate trading product form of jupiter.

The main website's Perps product has a core product logic similar to GMX, providing leverage long and short and profit cultivation for BTC, ETH and SOL. The peak of TVL in this part exceeds US$2 billion, which is a major component of Jupiter TVL. The average daily trading volume at peak times was also close to US$1 billion, making it Jupiter's early major cash flow business.

Jupiter Derivative Exchange TVL (left axis) and trading volume (right axis) data Source: DeFillama

The above can be regarded as Jupiter's current main products. In addition, there are the following products in the Jupiter system:

Meme trading platform Moonshot. In January 2025, Jupiter announced the acquisition of a majority stake in meme trading platform Moonshot.

Moonshot is a meme trading platform that has emerged in the past six months, relying on its silky methodThe currency deposit system and simple and smooth trading process attract many users to trade, and have created the Moonshot currency listing effect, especially when TRUMP is launched.

Moonshot's trading volume (left axis) and handling fees (right axis) Source: Dune

Liquidity Platform Meteora.

Meteora was founded by a co-founder of Jupiter (Ben Chow), and although it has no clear control relationship with Jupiter, it is also regarded as an important part of Jupiter's ecology. However, Meteora will issue coins on its own in the future. Although Meteora belongs to the Jupiter ecosystem, its relationship with JUP tokens is relatively roundabout.

LST product jupSOL, which quickly occupied a considerable market share after its launch in 2024. Currently, jupSOL is the fourth place after jitoSOL, bnSOL and mSOL

Solana LST market share (the gray block above is jupSOL) Source Dune

Launchpad LFG. In addition to the JUP token itself, LFG also successively in 2024 Launch has developed the governance tokens of ZEUS, the governance tokens of the cross-chain communication protocol zeus, the governance tokens of Sanctum, the governance tokens of the cross-chain protocol debridge, and several other meme projects. Although there are fewer projects online, the quality is relatively high.

Port Management Platform Jupiter Portfolio. In January this year, Jupiter officially announced the acquisition of on-chain portfolio tracker Sonarwatch, and officially launched Jupiter Portfolio on January 30. Mobile wallet Jupiter Mobile, acquired Solana's mobile terminalAfter Ultimate Wallet, Jupiter launched its mobile wallet.

The full-chain network Jupnet was launched at the end of January this year. The goal is to achieve one account access to all chains, all currencies and all commodities, but there is currently no experiential version directly targeting C-end users. The trading terminal Coinhall was acquired by Jupiter in September 2024 and mainly provides transactions of Cosmos ecological tokens. Through the acquisition of Coinhall, Jupiter gained the ability to build trading terminals on its own, and its Trenches product builds rely on this ability.

Currently, on-chain transactions of Cosmos ecological tokens are not frequent, with an average daily trading volume below US$10 million.

Source: Coinhall

Official website In addition to the above-mentioned C-end products, Jupiter has many other actions, such as the acquisition of Solana's browser SolanaFM. And they also have many products in their layout, such as the full-chain network Jupnet.

From the product layout, Jupiter, as Solana's largest C-end traffic entrance, covers almost all business directions except borrowing. Even in Solana, where the "mixed business" trend is very obvious, Jupiter's business tentacles are still the broadest. In addition to self-operating, they also expand their business boundaries through more radical acquisitions.

Profit model

Jupiter's current charging business includes:

Aggregation trading business (including Trenches) charges 0.05%-0.1%, current orders and DCA charges 0.1%. Derivatives business refers to the GMX mechanism, and the main charges come from the 0.06% handling fee when opening and closing positions, as well as loan fees, price impact fees, etc. However, the charges for derivatives are not allocated to JupiterDAO, but 75% of the fees are allocated to their liquidity provision.JLP, the remaining 25% were extracted by JupiterDAO. There is no charge for the rest of the business.

Token Incentive

Jupiter There is no daily token incentive plan, and its main incentive comes from two rounds of retrospective airdrops.

Competition situation

Trading is the core service provided by Jupiter. LST, Launchpad, wallet and other businesses can be regarded as a reuse of traffic to the transaction, so we mainly analyze Jupiter's competition in aggregation trading and derivative trading.

Aggregation Trading

In the competition for Solana trading portals, Jupiter quickly surpassed Orca and Raydium in the first half of 2024 with the characteristics of the multi-liquidity pool routing of the aggregator and its excellent user experience, and was in an absolute dominant position (accounting for 51% of Solana's trading sources in 24Q2, source: Messari).

However, with the popularity of meme and Pump.fun, trading tools specifically targeting meme such as Photon, Trojan, Bullx and GMGN quickly occupied Jupiter's share at the level of trading entrance. They focused on faster trading speeds and more comprehensive meme trading assistance functions, becoming the more recognized "Meme trading entrance". Jupiter launched similar tool ape.pro in October last year, but the market reacted and eventually merged into the main website's Trenches product. In the data, Jupiter's share of Solana's transaction sources fell to 38% in 24Q5 (Source: Messari)

meme transactions accounted for 90% of Solana's online transaction volume during the boom, and the partition of Meme transaction portals was the biggest problem facing Jupiter at the aggregation trading level.

Derivatives Trading

Jupiter's derivatives exchange is already the second largest derivatives exchange on the chain.Yiliang is second only to the Hyperliquid we will introduce in the next article. Specifically on the Solana chain, Jupiter has obvious advantages over its main competitor Drift, and its trading volume has been roughly 5-10 times that of Drift in recent days.

7-day derivatives exchange trading volume ranking Source: DeFillama

From the DAU, the gap between the two in the past month is also close to the order of magnitude.

Data source: Dune

In the field of derivatives trading, Jupiter's position on the Solana network is difficult to shake in the short term.

Main challenges and risks

Although Jupnet has launched its full-chain business, Jupiter's current core business is still in Solana. For Jupiter, the biggest unknown is whether the Solana network can maintain prosperity and maintain active on-chain transactions.

In addition to the challenges of unfavorable competition in Meme transaction portal mentioned above, the challenges and risks faced by Jupiter also include:

Business expansion is too radical and the effect is questionable. Jupiter's business expansion is much more radical than most Web3 projects. They have a grand business concept and have frequently expanded their business boundaries through acquisitions in the past year. But at present, many acquisitions have not had the expected results, such as the acquisition of Moonshot and the acquisition of Coinhall.

Compared with the highest single-day trading volume of US$660 million and revenue of US$10 million in January when it was acquired, Moonshot's daily trading volume has now dropped sharply to less than US$5 million, and its revenue does not exceed US$10,000. Although Jupiter did not disclose the price of the acquisition and the price paid, it was for JFor UP token holders, it is obvious that it will cost less to acquire Moonshot today.

Moonshot's trading volume (left axis) and handling fees (right axis) Source: Dune

The acquisition of Coinhall helped Jupiter establish its meme trading product Trenches capabilities. However, from the current actual situation, Trenches products have a big gap in terms of trading volume and voice volume, compared with the top meme trading products Photon, Bullx, Trojan, GMGN, etc.

No self-built liquidity pool

Jupiter does not have self-built liquidity pool. The Metrora it supports has already started the points plan and is expected to initiate an independent issuance process, which means that JupiterDAO or JUP tokens cannot capture the transaction fee for the step of "tokens are traded in the liquidity pool", and this part of the fee supports Raydium's business revenue in January this year.

Unbefore tested the bear market

In a bear market, many logic that is accustomed to in a bull market will be broken. For example, currently, the users of meme trading on Solana chain generally have a strong willingness to pay. They have almost no response to the 0.05% fee required by Jupiter aggregation transactions, because the charges of the meme tools of competitors are 0.5% or even 1%. However, in a bear market, after the trading enthusiasm decreases, users' sensitivity to transaction fees will also increase, and Jupiter may also fall into the contradiction between the two goals of "market share" and "net profit".

In addition, Jupiter currently has wallets, full-chain network Jupnet, portfolio management tool Jupiter Portfolio and other businesses that are difficult to generate revenue in the short term. There are also many questions about whether they can maintain such a huge product line in a bear market.

Value reference

JUP total volume is 10 billion, invested at the end of January this year3 billion tickets were destroyed, the largest circulating tokens currently are 7 billion, and the actual circulating is 2.63 billion, and the current circulating ratio is 38.5%. Among the current uncirculated tokens, 810 million team tokens will be initially unlocked in the next 21 months, and another 700 million tokens will be released in the Jupiter airdrop in January next year, with inflation exceeding 40% in the next year, and JUP is still a low-circulation high-inflation token.

The current distribution of JUP tokens Source: Jupiter Governance Forum

At the end of January just past, Jupiter announced that 50% of the agreement revenue would be used to repurchase JUP, and the repurchase JUP locked positions for 3 years.

The following figure is the Jupiter protocol revenue since October last year calculated by DeFillama (the outliers of Jupiter aggregator revenue may be incorrect on February 10 and March 10, but the author has not found any other data sources for Jupiter revenue statistics at present). It can be seen that Jupiter's current main revenue still comes from derivative trading (blue bar). Of course, this is not unrelated to the fact that Meme trading enthusiasm has dropped significantly when Jupiter aggregator charges are launched.

Data source: DeFillama

Since Jupiter just completed a major economic model update at the end of January, charging 0.05%-0.1% for aggregation transactions, the more reference value of P/S data are February and March.

According to the Jupiter revenue data collected by DeFillama, Jupiter's revenue in February was US$31.7 million, with an annualized revenue of US$380 million, corresponding to PS (circulation) only 365 and PS (full circulation) was 9.5; while the revenue ended on March 18 was US$12.25 million, with an annualized revenue of US$253 million, corresponding to PS (circulation) of 5.45 and PS (full circulation) of 14.15.

Source: DeFillama

Whether it is horizontally comparing the Cowswap we mentioned above or vertically comparing Jupiter itself, JUP's current valuation seems to be low.

Of course, the above data are all based on the Solana craze. As the popularity of Solana further decreases in the future bear market, it is very difficult to maintain such a high income. We have seen this in the data trend in March compared to February.