Jito Declares War on Coinbase & Binance | Lucas Bruder on the Launch of JTX

Jito is launching JTX, a prosumer trading terminal on Solana built by Lucas Bruder and his team, with the explicit goal of taking market share from centralized exchanges including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, NASDAQ, and the NYSE. The product targets tokens with market caps of one million dollars and above, tokenized equities, and major assets, and is not designed for traders with hold times under one to ten minutes. Jito has historically operated at the infrastructure layer, so building a consumer product is new territory, and the team hired additional people focused on retention, user growth, and dedicated customer support specifically for JTX.

JTX is designed to feel like a centralized exchange, with a clean UI, simple order box, P&L tracking with entry price and unrealized P&L, limit orders, TWAPs, and a feature called Smart Fill. It abstracts away meme coin details like frozen status and top holder distribution. Perps are not included at launch but a Phoenix Perps integration is planned shortly after, and prediction markets are also on the post-launch roadmap. JTX uses Privy for key pair management with email sign-in and passkey setup, and an on-ramp will be added, though the specific option has not been finalized. Bruder notes that direct on-chain on-ramps carry higher fees than centralized exchange on-ramps because they must price in fraud risk given JTX is non-custodial.

A core feature called Good Trade compares the output of an on-chain trade in real time against the same trade simulated on the best centralized exchanges. Bruder says trading majors on Solana is already showing cheaper results than centralized exchanges in these comparisons, attributing this to significant advances in Solana execution quality over the past twelve to eighteen months driven by proprietary AMM innovation. JTX routes transactions away from validators identified as likely to sandwich trades, and Bruder says Jito has learned over time which validators to exclude, though JTX transactions receive no preferential treatment in BAM specifically.

JTX has no new token. JTO is the token for the exchange, with 80 percent of JTX revenue going to the Jito DAO and 20 percent reinvested. All JTX fees will be used to buy JTO and return it to the DAO rather than distributing collected assets like USDC. The DAO has not yet decided whether to burn the JTO or hold it. JTO carried a fully diluted value of approximately 600 to 700 million dollars at the time of recording.

Prop AMMs are central to why Bruder believes on-chain execution can beat centralized venues. Unlike traditional AMMs that rely on arbitrageurs to correct prices, prop AMMs hold their curve and spread logic on chain rather than depending on mempool observation. They are more computationally efficient than order books, with shifting a midpoint price costing sub-100 compute units versus roughly 40,000 for an order book trade. SolFi from the Ellipsis team was the first next-generation prop AMM on Solana, and the model has since spread to Ethereum L2s and mainnet. BisonFi, run by Jump Trading, currently shows spreads of approximately half a basis point on the SOL USDC market, with depth of less than one basis point for 100 SOL. Bruder says prop AMMs are already beating centralized exchanges on price and may be starting to beat venues like the NYSE and NASDAQ. He argues they are beginning to resemble implied order books and offer renewed hope for on-chain price discovery, with Hyperliquid already showing some price discovery and Solana likely to achieve it shortly, particularly during off-hours when traditional markets are closed.

Toxic prop AMM behavior on Solana, where bait transactions were placed and then yanked to extract value from retail traders, was publicly called out by Will Warren of 0xMatcha. Bruder says social shaming was effective and that aggregators and distribution owners can cut off flow to manipulative prop AMMs. JTX uses Dflow, which routes using live chain state rather than a stale snapshot, reducing exposure to this behavior. Bruder considers the problem largely solved as of several months ago.

Tokenized stocks are one of the top two things happening on Solana right now according to Bruder. There were days on Solana where tokenized stock volume exceeded meme coin volume. Backpack is leading on tokenized stock volume but has only around five assets listed, while other providers have tens or hundreds. A fragmentation problem exists where three or four different versions of the same stock, such as NVIDIA, are tokenized on Solana with separate charts and price wicks due to low liquidity. Bruder predicts that within six to nine months it will be possible to trade any stock in any country in the world on chain, and that JTX is specifically designed to bring people who do not currently trade on chain into the Solana ecosystem. JTX is launching on the 14th with early access prioritized by referral count, and Bruder describes the initial release as a total MVP with significant additions planned including perpetuals, prediction markets, equities expansion, and a data feature he says no other platform currently offers.