Solana Is Winning the Trading War @jito_labs co-founder & CEO @buffalu__ joins @gazza_jenks at Consensus to explain why Jito is expanding from @solana infrastructure into consumer trading products with the launch of @jtx_trade. "Most new people coming into crypto are using Solana because it’s fast and cheap." OUTLINE 00:00 - Introduction 00:31 - Why Build on Solana 02:15 - Solana vs Ethereum 03:32 - Builder Challenges 05:38 - Launching JTX 08:12 - The Future of Trading 09:05 - Meme Coins and RWAs 11:27 - FTX and Solana 13:33 - Builder Culture 15:00 - JTX and AI Tools

New episode with @buffalu__ CEO of @jito_labs out now! We Discuss: - JTX Launch - Bam Infrastructure - Pro Trading on @solana - And more! Timestamps 👇 (0:00) Introduction (1:14) What Is JTX? (3:35) Building Better Trading UX (7:02) Bam Plugins And Pricing (9:11) Winning Hyperliquid Traders (12:48) Everything Exchange Thesis (14:00) Solana Market Structure (17:00) 12 Month Success Vision (18:22) Jito Product Synergies (20:52) Vertical Integration Concerns (22:52) Private Order Automation (23:52) Desktop First, Mobile Soon (25:28) Closing Comments

Now on stage at @CIS_2060 Institutional Forum @marcliew888, Head of APAC at @jito_sol Foundation Jito is one of the key infrastructure layers in the Solana ecosystem — combining liquid staking (JitoSOL) with MEV-powered rewards to enhance yield for validators and users. Sharing insights on how staking, MEV, and capital efficiency are evolving across Solana — especially at the institutional level.

phoenix trade launched flight codes today. atomic composability layer that lets any solana app, bot, or agent embed perpetuals and earn fees from routed order flow. jito labs already chose phoenix as the perps provider for JTX launching july. drift collapsed in april and ~70% of solana perp DEX volume migrated out. phoenix matched losses up to $5k for drift users, hit record daily volume may 13, and runs 6x cheaper than hyperliquid for SOL perps. paradigm wrote a $44m check for this. the next 90 days of third-party flight codes integrations will determine if this becomes solana's derivatives layer or just another venue with better unit economics

Hyperliquid should watch their back now? A friend asked me the other day: "@HyperliquidX is taking too much market share. Do you think there's another perp DEX that can actually catch up?" It made me think for a while. So I went digging, and found the answer on @solana. It's called @PhoenixTrade How so? Recently @toly, co-founder of Solana, has been mentioning perp DEXs and Phoenix quite a few times. Around the same time, Solana launched a new X account @perps. And right after @DriftProtocol collapsed, around 70% of Solana's perp DEX volume bled out to Hyperliquid & @Lighter_xyz The entire Solana stack is rebuilding the perp DEX category from scratch. And Phoenix is the one they picked Why Phoenix specifically: - Built by @ellipsis_labs, the same team behind @SolFiAMM - Raised $44M from @paradigm, @ElectricCapital, @robotventures - Fees at 0.005%, cheaper than most other perp DEXs - The original Phoenix orderbook had one of the tightest spreads Why Solana will actually pull this off this time: - No network outage since Feb 2024 - @anza_xyz shipping validator and scaling upgrades for perp DEX infra - I remember Solana came back from the FTX collapse. They got hit hard, only to thrive stronger And not only that The Phoenix airdrop also caught my attention because competition is unusually low: - Most retail gave up on it when no token came - Others moved to perp DEXs with confirmed point programs - Some quit because the new product costs more in fees Look at the Solana TGE pattern: - @JupiterExchange: 2+ years from mainnet to token - @wormhole: 2.5 years - @MeteoraAG: 3 years - @jito_sol: 1.5 years Build product → Find PMF → Then token. Same playbook And @perps literally said they'll "be back in 12 months" with an updated leaderboard. That's your timeline, almost officially Good things take time. This is a position for the next few years Worth taking a shot Winter Soldier out

Just got back from @consensus2026 Miami. Some unfiltered thoughts on the vibes: The industry has clearly grown up. The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers. Cautiously optimistic with a distinctly institutional aftertaste. This was not a bull market conference. Key takeaways: 1) CLARITY Act has serious momentum. Everyone at the conference basically agrees it's getting done before summer. The urgency is real, people are done waiting. And the regulatory window feels genuinely unprecedented: CLARITY Act, GENIUS Act, a CFTC chair actively engaging with the industry, this combination has never existed simultaneously before. The institutional urgency you're seeing everywhere is directly correlated to this window feeling time-limited. Miss it and you're explaining to your board why you sat on your hands during the most favorable crypto regulatory environment in history. 2) Institutions are not dabbling anymore. They are ALL IN on tokenization and terrified of missing it. No one is debating whether blockchain rails are useful. The debate is now who gets the mandate. And quietly @coinbase , @krakenfx , @RobinhoodApp and @Bullish and others are being seen more as competitors than potential partners by a lot of these TradFi players. 3) TradFi M&A is going to keep ripping. @krakenfx just grabbed Reap for $600M. Visa, Mastercard, Swift etc they can't miss the train and they're willing to overpay for the ticket. 4) Crypto VC is consolidating fast. @a16z and @katie_haun just announced $2.2B and $1B funds respectively. Meanwhile the boutique VCs are either pivoting to AI or quietly closing shop. Same playbook is happenign as traditional VC, the big platforms eat everything and the small guys scramble. Seed and pre-seed is basically a ghost town right now. Late stage and pre-IPO is where the action is. 5) Investment themes were aggressively consensus (no pun intended): Stablecoins, tokenization, vertically integrated neo-banks, regulated or permissioned DeFi. Literally everyone is trying to be a tokenization platform. Issuance, management, settlement, curation, pick your lane, slap tokenization on it, try to raise money. 6) Building in crypto is genuinely hard now. Your competition isn't some scrappy new L1 or GMX, it's @tether , @Anchorage , and @Securitize. there are now many crypto businesses running 200M+ annual Rev with serious management teams and deep pockets. The barbarians are now the establishment. New entrants are going to have a very bad time. 7) Pure token-only plays have become extremely contrarian. Controversial take but I think the biggest returns will come from a handful of tokens that can credibly signal in a compliant way that the token remains the only value accruing asset going forward. 8) A lot of teams are in a genuinely weird spot on the token/equity dynamics. Decent products, decent teams, but a complete stakeholder clusterf*** that nobody can untangle. Many of these will simply not survive. 9) The agentic finance and agentic commerce crowd was loud. The actual substance was not. A lot of big claims, very little to show for it. Feels very early and mostly vibes. Color me skeptical for now. 10) @Bullish acquiring Equinity for $4.2B was the boldest move of the conference. @ThomasFarley and @BonannoDavid now have a full-stack RWA proposition: issuance, transfer agency, tokenization, exchange and settlement under one roof. Massive move. Very positive for the industry regardless of whether you think the price or the move were right. 11) @BitMNR and @fundstrat are apparently tired of winning and has decided to let your grandma keep her ETH... for now. The pace of accumulation is slowing. Tom, we await your next allocation with bated breath. 12) DeFi apps are moving up the stack and getting smarter about it. They don't want to be the commodity infrastructure layer getting squeezed by exchanges that own distribution. Some genuinely interesting announcements, @buffalu__ at @jito_sol launching JTX being the highlight. 13) Nobody at the conference was talking about retail coming back. The entire conversation was institutional. That's either a sign of maturity or a sign that the industry has quietly given up on mainstream consumer adoption for now and is betting the next cycle gets pulled by institutional flows rather than retail FOMO. Probably both. 14) The L1 debate is officially dead. Nobody and I mean nobody was arguing SOL vs ETH or pitching their shiny new L1. The crowd that used to religiously defend their chain of choice has either grown up, cashed out, or both. Institutions don't care about your consensus mechanism. They care about settlement finality, compliance rails and liquidity. The L1 wars were fun while they lasted. RIP. 15) DATs are a mess. Had some genuinely productive conversations with a few of them but let's be honest most are an absolute clusterf*** operationally and very few are running anything resembling a legitimate business. The structure is a disaster at the stakeholder level and the governance makes your average startup cap table look clean. That said, the permanent capital vehicle concept is still genuinely compelling and I think a handful of these will turn out to be absolute home runs. The model isn't broken, most of the teams just are. Bottom line: Consensus 2026 felt like the moment crypto stopped being a movement and started being an industry. Whether that's exciting or depressing probably depends on when you got in.