E183: Jupiter COO: Getting Rich In Crypto Has Nothing To Do With Luck

Kash Dhanda, COO of Jupiter, argues that getting rich in crypto has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with discipline, removing emotion from decision-making, and identifying genuine alpha by picking the right projects and understanding where capital is deployed.

Dhanda entered crypto in 2016 and in 2021 turned down an entrepreneur-in-residence role at a major Singapore bank to go all-in on Solana through a project called Superteam, which was built to create a talent layer for the Solana ecosystem. Superteam grew from a small Slack channel into a global movement, giving Dhanda exposure to thousands of builders worldwide and a diversified perspective comparable to a venture capitalist without deploying capital. He joined Jupiter approximately a year and a half ago. Jupiter did 1.2 trillion dollars in trading volume last year, ranks number one by TVL on Solana, and is among the most used protocols in all of crypto, though Dhanda describes it as still tiny compared to anything that matters in the real world.

Dhanda describes Jupiter's GUM, or Global Unified Markets, as functioning like a decentralized Binance without centralized counterparty risk. He frames chain fragmentation as the new version of the centralized exchange problem, and argues that on GUM every asset is tradable the second it is created, in contrast to Binance's permissioned listing process that involves marketing fees.

Dhanda is emphatic that Solana is the only chain that keeps improving and can coordinate rapidly across a decentralized network, and he views it as an everything chain where users can conduct their entire financial life. On quantum security, he argues it represents an existential threat and that Solana's community can coordinate to address it in a way Bitcoin's community cannot.

Dhanda strongly disagrees with the view that great crypto investment returns are gone, calling that belief completely wrong. He points to stablecoins doing more volume than Visa and Mastercard combined, approximately 300 billion dollars of stablecoins currently on chain, and US Treasury discussions about reaching 2 trillion dollars of stablecoins on chain within the next few years as evidence the industry remains miniscule relative to its potential. He frames crypto as currently sitting at the chasm between innovators and the early majority as described in Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, and predicts that as more liquidity and players come on chain, returns will go parabolic and entirely new winners will emerge.

On institutional adoption, Dhanda says institutions are moving from elementary to middle school level understanding of crypto. He notes institutions are not seduced by ideology and require real use cases, case studies, user growth evidence, and clear liquidity sources. His view is that crypto is currently only about two times better than traditional alternatives for institutions, and that adoption will not scale until it is five to ten times better. He cites Apollo managing approximately 300 billion dollars but having only millions to low billions in on-chain private credit issuance, and JPMorgan's commercial paper transaction on Solana with Galaxy and Anchorage as a 50 million dollar proof of concept, as illustrations that a significant portion of institutional activity remains at proof of concept phase rather than scaling phase. He adds that a meaningful part of his job involves countering reputational damage caused by bad actors in the industry when speaking to institutions, which he describes as tiring.

Dhanda's advice for newcomers has shifted 180 degrees away from staying online constantly toward attending events in person and leveraging other people's knowledge directly, reflecting his view that the edge in crypto increasingly comes from human networks and firsthand information rather than passive consumption.