Jupiter aggregator

Proprietary automated market makers now dominate execution on Solana’s most liquid pairs, reshaping how decentralized finance handles order routing and raising questions about market structure as Wall Street prepares to tokenize equities on blockchain rails. Understanding this shift is essential as traditional finance migrates onto crypto infrastructure and the definition of transparency in DeFi evolves beyond simple openness.

• PropAMMs account for approximately 15% to 27% of daily on-chain DEX volume across crypto markets generally.
• For SOL-to-stablecoin trades routed through Jupiter, propAMMs represent above 90% of execution volume.
• Nasdaq, the London Stock Exchange, Robinhood, and Kraken are building tokenized equity frameworks set to launch in 2027.

• 90% PropAMM share of SOL-to-stablecoin trades routed through Jupiter aggregator
• 0.72 bps Median execution slippage for SOL-USDC propAMM fills versus centralized exchange midpoint
• 91.9% PropAMM fills beating estimated lowest institutional centralized exchange fee tier
• Q2 2027 Expected launch window for Nasdaq’s tokenized equity framework on blockchain

Jupiter operates not as a direct trading venue but as a liquidity aggregator, searching across decentralized exchanges, proprietary automated market makers, and request-for-quote networks to find optimal execution for users. When a trader swaps SOL for USDC on Jupiter’s interface, the order routes invisibly through whichever liquidity source offers the best price, meaning the counterparty is often a professional trading firm with proprietary pricing software rather than a public pool or another user. A new analysis from DWF Ventures reveals that this shift toward professional market makers has accelerated dramatically, particularly on Solana where block times and transaction costs favor rapid repricing.

Professional Market Makers Now Dominate Solana’s Busiest Pairs

PropAMMs emerged as a response to a fundamental problem in early DeFi automated market makers: passive liquidity pools price assets using formulas rather than real-time market data, creating opportunities for arbitrageurs to exploit stale quotes. A professional AMM works differently. Instead of relying on external liquidity providers, a trading firm supplies its own capital and uses private software to continuously adjust quotes based on external market prices. The transaction settles on-chain, but the pricing decision happens within the firm’s own systems.

For highly liquid pairs like SOL-USDC, this model has proven superior to traditional AMMs. Jump Crypto examined approximately 20 million propAMM fills from March 2024 and found that the median execution occurred 0.72 basis points away from centralized exchange midpoints, with 91.9% of fills executing cheaper than the lowest institutional centralized exchange fee tier. The appeal is straightforward: professional market makers with access to external price feeds and sophisticated inventory management can offer tighter execution than passive pools. These firms compete fiercely for order flow, which drives prices tighter across the market.

Solana’s Speed Enables Proprietary Market Making at Scale

Solana’s block-time advantage directly supports propAMM economics. Ethereum operates with 12-second slots, while Solana targets 300-millisecond transaction confirmation times, reducing the window in which market makers face stale-price exposure and arbitrage risk.

Professional trading firms obsess over price staleness. A market maker quoting SOL at $100 faces severe losses if that quote remains live while the rest of the market reprices to $101. Faster settlement and repricing cycles mean smaller losses per outdated quote, making it economical for firms to compete aggressively for order flow. This explains why propAMMs have concentrated on Solana relative to other blockchains and why Jupiter’s aggregator architecture, which can seamlessly route to the best available liquidity source across multiple systems, has become the dominant interface for Solana trading. The economic advantage compounds over millions of trades daily.

Wall Street Tokenized Assets Will Likely Use Professional Market Making Instead of Public Pools

Nasdaq announced Thursday that its venture arm agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company, while continuing development of Nasdaq Equity Tokens, with a framework launch expected in the second quarter of 2027. The London Stock Exchange announced a separate partnership with Payward around tokenized equities and plans to list xStocks for trading on its LSE 24 venue in 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Robinhood has already deployed tokenized stocks through Robinhood Chain using request-for-quote systems that connect to professional market makers rather than public AMM liquidity. These decisions reflect confidence that professional market-making infrastructure can handle established assets more efficiently than permissionless pools.

The significance lies not in whether traditional assets move onto blockchain rails, but in what market structure they adopt when they arrive. Mature assets like Apple shares, Treasuries, or major cryptocurrencies have deep reference markets with professional dealers willing to manage inventory around them. When these assets become tokenized and settle on a blockchain, they will not naturally default to the permissionless public pool model that defined early DeFi. Instead, traders will route orders through professional market makers competing to provide the best execution, settled transparently on-chain but priced through private trading infrastructure. This hybrid approach preserves on-chain settlement transparency while leveraging off-chain price discovery.

This creates a different version of DeFi market structure than the original vision imagined: blockchains can expose settlement and ownership to public verification without exposing the machinery of price formation.

The market-structure implications extend further. Routers like Jupiter decide which firms are allowed to compete, which liquidity sources receive orders, and how quotes are compared before execution. As block builders, transaction landing systems, and market makers begin to overlap in influence, questions that traditional finance spent decades regulating come into focus on blockchains. What exactly constitutes best execution when multiple layers can influence price and routing? When a single entity controls aggregation, market making, transaction delivery, or block building, does that create conflicts of interest around order priority? Blockworks Research found evidence of this already, examining periods when certain market makers received faster price updates from validators than competitors, though the advantage later disappeared.

The DWF Ventures analysis also notes that traditional AMMs will likely survive for assets without mature outside reference markets. Token launches with no existing price discovery mechanism still need permissionless liquidity pools to establish initial trading. The division may ultimately reflect what each market structure does best: professional dealers and routers for established assets with deep trading communities elsewhere, public AMMs for the long tail of new tokens needing to discover price without waiting for institutional participation. Regulatory frameworks remain underdeveloped for how blockchain-based market making should be overseen or whether existing equity market regulations apply to tokenized securities. Nasdaq’s scheduled framework launch in Q2 2027 will provide the first major test of whether tokenized equities routing through blockchain infrastructure adopt the professional dealer model wholesale or create a hybrid approach that preserves elements of permissionless access.