Jupiter Chief Operating Officer Kash Dhanda said more than half of his personal portfolio is held in stablecoins earning 5% to 7% yield, with the rest allocated to high-risk assets. He described the setup as a barbell strategy and said disciplined positioning, not luck, is what gives ordinary participants a realistic path to building wealth in crypto.
Dhanda made the remarks on the When Shift Happens podcast hosted by Kevin Follonier. The episode was recorded on Aug. 20, 2026. Dhanda was introduced as Jupiter’s COO, a member of the founding team at Superteam, and someone who previously worked in human-centered design at LUMA Institute. Jupiter was described in the episode as Solana’s largest decentralized exchange, with $1.2 trillion in trading volume last year and the top total value locked ranking on Solana.
A portfolio built around stablecoins and high-risk assets
One of the sharpest takeaways from the interview was Dhanda’s own asset allocation. He said more than half of his portfolio sits in stablecoins, while the other half is exposed to assets that could fall 85% within six weeks. In his view, that split is not conservative so much as it is a way to balance the volatility inherent in the rest of the book.
He said, 「I have more than half of my portfolio in stablecoins. The other half is in extremely high-risk assets that could be down 85% in six weeks.」
For a broader framework, Dhanda said an ideal portfolio would look something like 70/20/10: 70% in major tokens, 20% in narrative-driven tokens for the current cycle, and 10% in highly volatile speculative assets.
He said, 「The ideal portfolio is probably 70/20/10: 70% majors, 20% narrative tokens for this cycle, and only 10% in high-volatility junk.」
Slow wealth over quick riches
Dhanda’s central point was that making money in crypto is less about chance and more about discipline. He argued that many participants focus only on trading and ignore yield and lending opportunities, even though yield is, in his telling, the only widely proven route to compounding wealth over time.
He said, 「The only proven way to compound wealth is yield.」
He compared the current state of on-chain credit to where on-chain trading stood three to five years ago, saying the sector is only starting to produce durable value and workable models. For investors with a large allocation to high-risk assets, he said the other side of the portfolio should be stablecoins earning 5% to 7%, with compounding doing the heavy lifting over time.
He also pushed back on the fantasy of instant crypto wealth. Instead of asking how to turn $100 into $1 billion, he said people should think about moving from 100 to 10,000 and then from 10,000 to 100,000.
He summed that up with a line he credited to Balaji: 「Crypto is a slow-rich game and a get-rich-quick correction game.」
Meme coins as speculative entertainment
Dhanda took a blunt view of meme coins. He said he is not a meme coin defender and does not buy into the elaborate theories often built around them. In his account, the industry has a habit of inventing grand narratives when there is not much else to explain.
His line on the sector was direct: 「Meme coins are video games. What they provide is an adrenaline service. Video games do not live forever.」
He said a small number may survive for a long time, in the way that a major online game can hold an audience for years. Most, though, attract a temporary wave of players and then die off as capital and attention move to the next thing. If another meme coin wave arrives, he said, the winner will likely be the most interesting one, not the most durable one.
That view fed back into his portfolio advice. In his telling, many people were burned in the last cycle because they moved what should have been core allocations into meme coins and treated them as if they were permanent assets.
He said, 「If your dream is to get rich on a meme coin, you should change your dream.」
Yield is the price of risk
Dhanda did not present on-chain yield as easy money. He framed it as a pricing mechanism for risk and said investors should read it that way.
He said, 「Yield is risk with a price on it. If something is giving you 20% yield, you had better believe you are taking some kind of risk.」
He warned against dropping one’s guard just because a strategy does not involve leverage or meme coins. For him, the practical answer is diversification. A 20% yield strategy is not necessarily bad on its own, but making it 100% of a portfolio is where the problem starts.
When discussing protocol selection, Dhanda compared the process to choosing a poker table. A great player can still lose if the table is wrong. In crypto, he said, there are only a handful of protocols he would consider trustworthy, and capital will likely keep clustering around projects with a record of not blowing up.
Jupiter Lend, Aave, Fluid and Sky
Asked which protocols he trusts, Dhanda said that because he works at Jupiter, he personally uses Jupiter Lend for most of his yield-bearing stablecoin allocation. He cited the protocol’s year-plus operating history, a strong internal focus on security, seven audits, open-source code, formal verification and what he described as the right off-chain controls.
He also mentioned other names he views positively: Fluid, Aave and Sky. He likened that thinking to the Lindy effect, saying that the longer a protocol survives, the more likely it is to keep surviving.
Dhanda added that Jupiter uses Fireblocks, Anchorage and BitGo for collateral custody and risk reduction, describing that setup as part of the path from tens of billions in scale to the trillions.
Institutions are still in the "skeptically curious" phase
On institutional adoption, Dhanda said large firms are still in what he called a "skeptically curious" stage. A few years ago, they were asking what blockchain even was. Now they generally understand Bitcoin and private networks, but still need basic explanations on topics such as on-chain credit, perpetuals and concrete use cases.
He described them as early-majority users rather than ideology-driven adopters. They want to see real use cases, case studies, user growth and liquidity formation. In his view, crypto will not get them in the door unless it is five to ten times better than current alternatives. Right now, he said, the industry is probably only about two times better.
Dhanda also said crypto was supposed to remove intermediaries and counterparty risk, yet the industry ended up accumulating a lot of both in practice. That, he said, leaves him spending a meaningful share of his time explaining security standards and code transparency to institutions.
"Infinite capitalism": infinite access times infinite assets
Dhanda’s broader framework for the industry is what he called "infinite capitalism," which he described as infinite access multiplied by infinite assets. In his view, anyone, at any time, in any place should be able to participate in capital markets, whether for fundraising, trading or earning yield.
He said, 「Infinite access, infinite assets. Anyone, any time, any place can participate in capital markets.」
He pointed to tokenized stocks as an example already visible inside Jupiter. Roughly 30% of tokenized stock trading volume on the platform happens on weekends, he said. He also said a tokenized stock called Bot on Solana traded more on Sunday than it did on Monday on Nasdaq, which he presented as evidence that market behavior is already migrating into always-on on-chain venues.
He put the social argument in simple terms: 「A kid in Jakarta and the best trader in New York get the same tools.」
On the asset side, Dhanda said anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized, and a large number of crypto-native experiments will emerge alongside that. He said this thesis was a major reason he joined Jupiter.
What wins when assets are infinite and liquidity is not
Asked which projects are positioned to win in a world of limited liquidity and nearly unlimited assets, Dhanda listed three characteristics.
- First, they must solve a real problem and create real value for real people.
- Second, they must be transparent and maintain integrity toward investors, without hidden side deals or shorting their own token ahead of unlocks.
- Third, they need to understand where the big narratives are heading and capture attention at the right time.
He specifically identified real-world assets as the dominant narrative now. Projects building in that direction, he said, are better placed to benefit. He added that many projects rise quickly and fade just as fast because they only begin building when the narrative is already taking off.
Solana, RWA flows and tokenized stocks
Dhanda was emphatic on Solana. He said the network has clearly come back and called it the only chain that is still consistently getting better.
He said, 「Solana is the everything chain, the only chain that is still continuously improving.」
He pointed to performance upgrades and said Alpenglow is on the way, with block times, latency and finality moving closer to the experience offered by centralized exchanges. He also said on-chain participation is growing fast.
On flows, he gave two headline numbers: about $700 million in RWA has moved onto Solana over the past 30 days, more than all other chains combined, and 98% of on-chain tokenized stock trading takes place on Solana.
He added that a CLO product from Centrifuge and Janus Henderson, worth about $750 million, sits on Solana and is used by institutions including Athena. He also named Apollo’s ACredit, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI and BlackRock’s BUIDL as products on Solana.
In his telling, liquidity attracts liquidity. Where the market once followed stablecoin flows, it is now beginning to follow RWA flows.
Solana’s weakness: attention concentrated in a few protocols
Even while making the bullish case, Dhanda pointed to one weakness: attention in the ecosystem is too concentrated in a small number of protocols. Jupiter is one of them, which may be good for Jupiter’s business but is not necessarily ideal for the health of the ecosystem.
He said a healthy network needs a middle class of projects that can grow, experiment and break out. If the biggest stories every year are always the same handful of names, that is not a good sign.
For Solana’s 2026 case, he used a single phrase: the everything chain. He said it is the network on which users can plausibly build their full on-chain financial lives, and in his view no other chain has a credible argument that it can serve both large institutions and retail users at the same time.
He also framed Solana’s coordination speed as a long-term strategic advantage, one that matters not just for upgrades such as account expansion but also for existential issues such as quantum security. By contrast, he said he worries more about Bitcoin’s historical difficulty coordinating upgrades.
Jupiter as an on-chain finance super app
Asked what Jupiter is today, Dhanda called it an on-chain finance super app.
He said Jupiter now has 18 products and is trying to pull trading, yield and broader asset utility into a single destination. In his view, the DIY DeFi era is over, and users no longer want to manage their finances across ten open browser tabs.
The key to winning the super app race, he argued, is where the initial user traffic comes from. Since trading is still the most frequent on-chain activity, that gives Jupiter its natural beachhead. Users come back daily to trade, and Jupiter can then move them into lending, yield and prediction markets.
Dhanda also stressed that Jupiter builds its own products in-house, allowing different parts of the stack to reinforce each other. He said one of its portfolio products reaches 3 million wallets per quarter, making it possible to place direct prompts for other services such as moving USDC into Jupiter Lend for a 5% return.
Why Jupiter is building JupUSD
On JupUSD, Dhanda said stablecoins are an exceptionally good business and spoke with admiration for Tether and Circle. He called Tether one of the best businesses in human history on a profit-per-employee basis.
Still, he said that model keeps the economics at the issuer level. JupUSD, in his description, is meant to be a stablecoin for ordinary users.
He said that under the Genius Act, a stablecoin itself cannot directly pay yield just for being held. But because JupUSD is backed by Treasury bills and supported by Ethena and BlackRock’s BUIDL, Jupiter can pass the economics of that structure back to users.
He gave a practical example: if a user buys Solana through a weekly recurring order, the waiting capital can sit in JupUSD and compound before the order executes. Combined with Jupiter’s trading, lending, stablecoin, card and wallet products, he said that vertical integration makes JupUSD more useful than a standalone stablecoin.
GUM as a cross-chain liquidity hub
Dhanda also explained GUM. For a non-crypto audience, he said, it can be thought of as a decentralized Binance without the same centralized exchange counterparty risk.
He said Jupiter originally solved the DEX aggregation problem. Instead of checking Raydium, Orca and other venues one by one for the best price, users could come to a single entry point. The newer problem, he said, is fragmentation across chains.
Using examples from the interview, he said Robinhood has just launched a chain, Arbitrum has desirable assets, and Solana has desirable assets as well. Traders want to buy an asset the moment it goes live, regardless of which chain it launches on.
That is where GUM comes in. Dhanda described it as a cross-chain liquidity hub. He contrasted it with Binance, where assets must apply to be listed and may even need to pay marketing fees, whereas in GUM’s design any asset should become tradable the moment it is created.
Why JUP lagged and what Jupiter changed
Dhanda offered several reasons for JUP’s weak showing in the previous cycle.
Part of it, he said, was market structure. At the time, many investors still believed in the fat protocol thesis, which implied most value would settle at the protocol layer while applications would only capture a thin slice. There was also a broader narrative stack weighing on Jupiter: macro conditions could hit the whole market, Solana-specific weakness could pressure every Solana token, and weakness in Solana DeFi would then hit Jupiter specifically.
But he also said Jupiter made clear internal mistakes.
He said, 「Last cycle we spent too much time on DAO politics and did not manage the token itself like a product. That was a real mistake.」
He described Jupiter’s DAO as one of the largest and most active in crypto, something he is proud of. But he said the team spent too much time discussing politics and not enough time discussing product, while often just hoping the token would go up on its own.
He said Jupiter has started to correct that. According to Dhanda, Meow has locked all of his tokens until 2030, the team hired former KKR executive Xiao Xiao to meet funds and explain why the asset is different, and 50% of Jupiter’s revenue is now used to buy back JUP.
He said, 「We use 50% of our revenue to buy back JUP.」
On Hyperliquid: respect, differentiation and partnerships
When Hyperliquid came up, Dhanda started with respect, saying Jeff and his small team have done an excellent job. From there he focused on differentiation and collaboration.
He said Hyperliquid did two things especially well. The first was its airdrop design. By making the distribution highly concentrated, the project made a small group of users very wealthy. In his view, one of the fastest ways to build community in crypto is to make people rich.
Jupiter took the opposite route. Dhanda said Jupiter’s first airdrop reached about 1 million wallets and the second reached about 2 million.
The second strength he highlighted was Hyperliquid’s willingness to work with others. He said Jupiter is following a similar logic, citing partnerships with Ethena on stablecoins, Fluid on lending and Collector Crypt on GOTCHA. In his view, collaboration often works better than pure competition.
"On-chain finance is not a fad"
At the end of the interview, Dhanda said on-chain finance is not a temporary trend.
He recalled being worried during the last bear market, especially after the collapse of FTX, that the whole game might pause for a while. He said that concern is gone now. In his view, Bitcoin has roughly 100% awareness around the world, every major institution has an on-chain finance strategy, and people inside the industry can feel how quickly products are improving.
That leaves him with a different question. He said he no longer worries about whether the industry will disappear. The only issue now is how large it becomes and how quickly it gets there. His answer: very large, and faster than most expect.