Solana’s top swap venue Jupiter just released a mobile app

Solana’s march into mobile continued yesterday when the popular DeFi platform Jupiter released its mobile app. 

Jupiter’s pseudonymous founder meow said on X that the team built and dropped many features while developing the app, but the final version sticks pretty closely to Jupiter’s hit feature, which is swaps. Interestingly, Jupiter doesn’t appear to be making money from fees on the app, so the initiative is purely a play at growing Jupiter’s distribution for now. 

The app has just two tabs, one for making swaps and one for viewing your wallet balance. Jupiter partnered with MoonPay to offer fiat onramps, and I was able to fund a wallet with SOL via Apple Pay in under ten minutes. The process wasn’t completely seamless — I could only pay with my debit card rather than with a credit card, which I only learned by trial and error — but it felt smooth overall. 

Once Moonpay is set up and you have a wallet connected, it takes four taps to buy more SOL, which is a pretty frictionless experience akin to something like Robinhood. 

Candidly, it’s not the best-designed crypto app I’ve used. Even in the memecoin world, Moonshot has a sleeker UX with features like live price charts which Jupiter lacks. 

“[C]urrent onboarding for the app is still 2/10 – we are no where near ready for mainstream adoption,” meow told me in a text.

But it seems like for now, Jupiter may be betting that users want the best prices above all else — and taking aim at Phantom in the process. Jupiter is a swap aggregator that algorithmically routes trades across multiple decentralized exchanges to achieve the best possible price for users. It also doesn’t charge fees on swaps, making the prices even better. As I’ve written before, even as Jupiter releases other popular DeFi features like perpetual swaps and a token launchpad, swaps remain the moat that make Jupiter a force in Solana DeFi.

Phantom — which has a lot of distribution by dint of being arguably the most popular Solana wallet — also offers swaps through a mobile wallet, but its swap prices are consistently worse than Jupiter’s. Jupiter’s fee-generating products aren’t currently live on the mobile app, meaning this is currently a pure play for distribution — and Phantom is the most likely target for disruption.

As the Solana Seeker gears up for release, it’s becoming clearer that the Solana world thinks the crypto market of the future will be won and lost on mobile devices. With Jupiter’s launch, a pretty venerable competitor just entered that arena.

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