"Yield is just risk with a price tag."
That line framed a wide-ranging interview with Jupiter Chief Operating Officer Kash Dhanda on the When Shift Happens podcast, released after a recording on Aug. 20, 2026. Dhanda, who jokingly describes his role as "cat herder," discussed personal portfolio construction, meme coins, onchain yield, institutional adoption, Solana’s position in tokenized finance, and how Jupiter is trying to build a broader onchain financial platform.
The episode was hosted by Kevin Follonier and published under the title Getting Rich In Crypto Has Nothing To Do With Luck | The Crypto Passive Income Expert E183. Dhanda is also identified as a founding team member of Superteam. According to the episode notes, he joined Superteam in 2021 and moved to Jupiter a year and a half ago, after earlier work at LUMA Institute in human-centered design.
The source article also carried a conflict disclosure. Dhanda is Jupiter’s COO, and Jupiter is described there as the highest-volume decentralized exchange on Solana. The piece said Jupiter processed $1.2 trillion in trading volume last year and ranks first on Solana by total value locked. It also noted that the products discussed in the interview — Jupiter Lend, GUM, JupUSD and JUP — are all Jupiter products, and that Dhanda personally holds JUP and other Solana ecosystem assets. The article said the conversation reflects the guest’s views and should not be treated as investment advice or independent analysis.
More than half in stablecoins, the rest in high-risk assets
One of the most striking parts of the interview was Dhanda’s description of his own portfolio. He said more than half of his allocation is in stablecoins, earning roughly 5% to 7%. The other half, he said, sits in very high-risk assets that could drop 85% within six weeks.
He called that a barbell strategy. One side holds lower-risk stablecoin exposure that can generate yield. The other side accepts extreme volatility. In his telling, the conservative side is there to balance the risk taken on the speculative side.
For a more general framework, he offered a 70/20/10 model. In that structure, 70% goes to large, core assets, 20% to tokens tied to the cycle’s main narratives, and 10% to highly volatile names. He said his own definition of core holdings includes Bitcoin, Solana and JUP. On the narrative bucket, he used real-world assets, or RWA, as an example, saying investors could choose several tokens linked to that theme and hold them for a few months to a year.
His criticism of many retail portfolios was blunt. In his view, the problem in the last cycle was not simply that people bought meme coins. It was that many treated them as if they were permanent assets and moved the majority of their capital into them.
Meme coins as games, not durable holdings
Dhanda’s stance on meme coins was one of the clearest parts of the discussion. He said he is not a defender of the category and pushed back on attempts to wrap it in grand theories about community formation, the attention economy or political expression.
His line was direct: "Meme coins are video games. They provide an adrenaline service. Video games do not live forever."
He said a small number may last a long time, and used Doge as the rough equivalent of a long-running title. Most, in his view, attract players for a period and then die, only to be replaced by the next trend. If another meme coin wave comes, he said, the winner will likely be the most interesting one, not the one with the strongest case for long-term durability.
Dhanda also said many people inside crypto create serious narratives around meme coins because they do not want the industry to sound absurd at the dinner table. He said some of those people may now believe those narratives themselves, but he still sees meme coins in practical terms rather than ideological ones.
For investors hoping to get rich from a single meme coin, he had little encouragement. "If your dream is to get rich off some meme coin, you should change your dream," he said.
Why he sees crypto as a slow-rich game
A central thread in the conversation was Dhanda’s argument that making money in crypto has less to do with luck than with discipline. He said investors need to remove emotion, define entries and exits, and use yield as the engine for compounding.
He described crypto as "a slow rich game" and also as "a fast get-rich correction game," a line he said he borrowed from Balaji. The point, he said, is that many people spend all their time thinking about trading gains while ignoring yield and lending opportunities.
In his view, onchain credit today is roughly where onchain trading was three to five years ago: still early, but starting to produce real and durable value. He tied that claim back to his broader portfolio logic. If most of an investor’s risk is concentrated in high-volatility assets, the other side of the portfolio should be in stablecoins earning 5 to 7 percentage points and compounding over time.
He returned repeatedly to the line that yield is simply risk with a price attached. If something offers 20%, he said, investors should assume they are taking some form of risk, whether obvious or hidden. The bigger number is not the problem by itself. The problem is putting 100% of a portfolio into one high-yield position.
Dhanda also pushed back on the idea that everyone entering crypto should aim for outsized capital gains only. He mentioned that some people sell covered calls on Bitcoin and that the strategy can work if nothing goes wrong, but added that it is not suitable for most investors. He compared expert advice in crypto to learning basketball from Michael Jordan: the skill level, context, resources and network are too different to make the lesson easily transferable.
His advice was to think in stages — from $100 to $10,000, then from $10,000 to $100,000 — rather than obsessing over turning $100 into $1 billion.
The table matters: where he parks stablecoins
When asked why he would keep more than half his holdings in stablecoins if he was already in crypto, Dhanda answered with a poker analogy. Being the best player does not help, he said, if you sit at the wrong table.
For him, the lesson is that only a small number of protocols are trustworthy enough for this type of allocation. He said the safer choices are the ones with a record of not blowing up and the ones the industry is likely to consolidate around over time.
He said Jupiter is trying to reduce protocol risk in part through custody arrangements, including putting collateral with Fireblocks, Anchorage and BitGo. In his framing, steps like that are part of the path from an industry measured in tens of billions to one measured in trillions.
Asked which protocols he trusts, Dhanda first noted the obvious conflict: he works at Jupiter. He said he mainly uses Jupiter Lend and keeps most of his yield-bearing stablecoins there. His explanation rested on Jupiter’s internal security posture and operating record. He cited more than a year of performance, seven audits, open-source code, formal verification and offchain controls.
He also named Fluid, Aave and Sky as protocols he sees as credible. He likened that preference to a Lindy effect: the longer something has survived, the more likely it is to continue surviving.
Institutions are curious, but still in proof-of-concept mode
Follonier raised a familiar contradiction: crypto was supposed to remove intermediaries and counterparty risk, yet the sector has accumulated a great deal of both.
Dhanda’s answer was that the theory always looks cleaner than the real world. In practice, he said, the industry’s barrier to entry is so low that simply being transparent, acting normally and avoiding major failures is often enough to stand out. At the same time, that forces more credible operators to spend a large share of their energy explaining to institutions why they are different from the projects that failed before them.
He said institutional players are approaching crypto with what he called skeptical curiosity. A few years ago, they were still asking what blockchain was. Now they broadly understand Bitcoin and private networks, but they still need basic explanations for areas such as onchain lending and perpetual futures.
Dhanda described them as early-majority users rather than ideologues. They are not attracted by crypto’s philosophy. They want concrete use cases, examples, user growth and evidence of where liquidity comes from. He said the bar is high: they will not show up unless the product is five to ten times better than the existing alternative, and his view is that crypto is currently closer to two times better.
Infinite capitalism: unlimited access times unlimited assets
Dhanda’s larger framework for crypto’s direction was what he called infinite capitalism. His formula was simple: unlimited access multiplied by unlimited assets.
On the access side, he said anyone should be able to participate in capital markets at any time and from anywhere, whether for fundraising, trading or earning yield. Those markets run 24/7, which he said is powerful but also exhausting.
He used tokenized stocks as evidence that the shift is already underway. Jupiter, he said, is seeing about 30% of tokenized stock trading volume happen on weekends. He also cited a tokenized stock called Bot, saying its Sunday trading volume on Solana exceeded its Monday trading volume on Nasdaq.
His phrase was memorable: "A kid in Jakarta gets the same tools as the best trader in New York."
On the asset side, he argued that anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized, and that crypto-native experiments will keep appearing alongside more familiar financial products. He connected that to a future shaped by AI-driven abundance, where returns to capital, in his view, will outpace returns to labor. That, he said, will make ownership more important over time.
He also said that if one believes in this model of unlimited access plus unlimited assets, portfolio exposure should be aimed at projects positioned to benefit from it. He identified that belief as a key reason he joined Jupiter.
What wins in a world of limited liquidity and unlimited assets
Asked which projects are most likely to win if liquidity is finite but the supply of tokenizable assets is effectively infinite, Dhanda gave three traits.
- First, solve real problems and create real value for real people.
- Second, behave honestly toward investors through transparency and by avoiding questionable side deals or shorting one’s own token before unlocks.
- Third, understand where attention is going and where the large market narrative is moving.
He said the defining narrative right now is RWA. Projects building in that direction have a better chance of aligning with the present cycle. By contrast, many projects rise quickly and fall just as fast because they only begin building once the narrative is already taking off.
Why he calls Solana the "everything chain"
Dhanda was emphatic on Solana. He said anyone who truly understands the chain’s current condition is extremely bullish on it.
He pointed to technical improvements and market flows at the same time. Solana, he said, keeps getting faster and better. He also said Alpenglow is coming, with block times, latency and finality moving closer to the user experience of centralized exchanges.
He backed the claim with a set of numbers and examples. Over the past 30 days, roughly $700 million in real-world assets flowed into Solana, he said, more than all other chains combined. He added that 98% of tokenized stock trading happens on Solana. He also referenced a CLO product from Centrifuge and Janus Henderson, saying about $750 million has been placed on Solana and is used by institutions including Athena.
Dhanda further listed Apollo’s ACredit, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI and BlackRock’s BUIDL as products already on Solana. His argument was straightforward: liquidity attracts liquidity, and where market participants once watched stablecoin flows, they should now watch RWA flows.
He did identify a weakness. In his view, attention inside the Solana ecosystem is too concentrated on a small set of protocols. Jupiter benefits from that concentration, he acknowledged, but he said a healthy ecosystem still needs a middle class of projects that can grow, experiment and break out.
For 2026, he said Solana’s core case is that it is the "everything chain" and, in his words, the only chain that is still consistently getting better. He argued that Solana’s ability to coordinate upgrades across a decentralized network is underappreciated. In the short term, that supports changes such as account expansion. Over the longer term, he said, it matters for responding to existential threats such as quantum security.
He contrasted that with Bitcoin and said he has some concern about Bitcoin’s historical difficulty in coordinating upgrades. On Solana, he said he has none.
Jupiter’s pitch: trading, yield, borrowing and spending in one app
When asked what Jupiter is today, Dhanda answered: an onchain financial super app.
His shorthand was simple — trade, earn and use assets on Jupiter. He said the platform now has 18 products.
Dhanda argued that the old do-it-yourself era of DeFi, where users managed their financial lives across ten browser tabs, is over. In his view, winning the super app race depends not only on product depth but on where frequent user activity begins. For Jupiter, that starting point is trading.
Trading, he said, is the beachhead. Users come back daily, and that frequency makes it easier to introduce them to yield products, lending and prediction markets. A lending-first platform, by contrast, may only see users return every few weeks, which makes cross-selling into trading much harder.
He also said Jupiter’s products are built in-house and can reinforce one another. As one example, he said one of Jupiter’s portfolio products is used by 3 million wallets each quarter. That distribution layer can be used to push adjacent services, such as telling a user that idle USDC can be moved into Jupiter Lend to earn 5%.
Why Jupiter wants its own stablecoin, JupUSD
Dhanda said stablecoins are an exceptionally good business and spoke positively about both Tether and Circle. He described Tether as one of the best businesses in human history on a profit-per-employee basis. His criticism was not of the model itself but of who keeps the economics.
JupUSD, he said, is meant to be a stablecoin for ordinary users. Under the Genius Act, he noted, a stablecoin cannot itself pay yield simply for being held. Even so, JupUSD is backed by Treasury bills and supported through structures involving Ethena and BlackRock’s BUIDL, which Jupiter says allows it to pass part of the economics to users through product design rather than direct stablecoin interest.
He used recurring purchases of Solana as an example. If a user is dollar-cost averaging each week, the capital may sit idle before the order executes. Putting that capital into JupUSD during the wait, he said, lets the user keep compounding in the meantime.
The key word in his explanation was vertical integration. Jupiter has trading, lending, a stablecoin, a spending card and a wallet. Put together, he said, those products make JupUSD more useful than a standalone stablecoin.
GUM as a cross-chain liquidity hub
For GUM, Dhanda offered a plain-language description: it is like a decentralized Binance, but without the same centralized counterparty risk.
He said Jupiter’s first product challenge was helping users find the best price across decentralized exchanges such as Raydium and Orca. That is what the aggregator solved. The newer problem, in his view, is chain fragmentation. Robinhood has launched a chain. Arbitrum has some desirable assets. Solana has others.
In that setting, he said, users want to trade an asset the moment it becomes available, regardless of which chain it launches on. GUM is Jupiter’s answer to that demand, positioned as a cross-chain liquidity hub.
He also contrasted it with Binance’s listing structure. On a centralized exchange, getting listed usually requires an application and may involve marketing payments. On GUM, he said, every asset is tradable from the moment it is created.
Why JUP underperformed, and what Jupiter says it is changing
Dhanda said JUP did not perform well in the last cycle and gave both market-wide and internal reasons.
On the market side, he said many investors still believed in the fat protocol thesis, which assumed most value would accrue to base protocols while applications would capture only a thin layer. He also described what he called a narrative pyramid: macro conditions at the base, then ecosystem-level pressure, then category-level pressure, and finally individual projects at the top. In practice, he said, Jupiter rose with Solana but also suffered whenever Solana and Solana DeFi came under pressure together.
Still, he said the team made real mistakes of its own. It spent too much time on DAO politics and did not manage JUP as a product. He said Jupiter’s DAO is one of the largest and most active in crypto, which he sees as a point of pride, but added that too much of the conversation was political and not enough was product-focused.
He said the team has changed course. Meow has locked all of his tokens until 2030 and is taking nothing out, according to Dhanda. Jupiter has also brought in Xiao Xiao from KKR to meet funds and explain why JUP should be viewed as a different kind of asset. He added that 50% of Jupiter’s revenue is being used to buy back JUP.
On Hyperliquid: respect, differentiation and partnerships
Asked what people in the Jupiter office say about Hyperliquid, Dhanda began with respect for Jeff and his small team. He then pointed to two areas where he thinks Hyperliquid has executed especially well.
The first was airdrop design. He said Hyperliquid concentrated its airdrop heavily enough to make a relatively small group of users very wealthy, and argued that making people rich is one of the fastest ways to build a community in crypto. He contrasted that with Jupiter’s broader distributions, saying the first Jupiter airdrop covered about 1 million wallets and the second about 2 million.
The second was collaboration. Dhanda said Jupiter is thinking along similar lines, naming partnerships with Ethena on stablecoins, Fluid on lending and Collector Crypt on GOTCHA. In his view, working together often beats competing everywhere.
His final point: onchain finance is not going away
Dhanda closed the interview by saying onchain finance is not a passing phase. He recalled worrying during the last bear market, especially after the collapse of FTX, that the industry might stall for a while. He said that concern is no longer plausible to him.
His reasoning was that Bitcoin now has what he described as roughly 100% awareness worldwide, large institutions all have some form of onchain finance strategy, and people working inside the sector can feel how quickly products are improving and becoming easier to use.
Because of that, he said the real question is no longer whether the industry survives. The question is how large it gets, and how fast. His answer was brief: very large, and faster than most people expect.
