Howdy!

I got scooped on the news of pump.fun’s DEX launch, so my day is pretty much ruined. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Today, we’ve got Titan’s private mainnet and Sphere’s staking-to-bank pipeline:

Jupiter competitor Titan moves to private mainnet

Titan’s so-called meta DEX aggregator has moved to private mainnet, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.

The platform lets users swap by choosing among quotes from multiple Solana DEX aggregators, including Titan’s own. Titan Exchange CEO and co-founder Chris Chung says Titan bests Solana’s incumbent DEX aggregator Jupiter on price 80% of the time.

DEX aggregators algorithmically route trades across multiple DEXs to find the best possible price for a user. As a result, swapping between tokens on Jupiter nearly always nets traders more bang for their buck than on, say, Phantom. Meta DEX aggregators let users choose between the quotes given by various aggregators. LlamaSwap is a popular meta DEX on Ethereum, but Titan is porting the concept to Solana. 

Sitting in a coffee shop a stone’s throw away from the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit, I asked Chung to explain how Titan can beat Jupiter on price. He said it’s “pure mathematics.”

“Classical pathfinding is more like spray and pray. That’s why [Jupiter’s] routes are always like in 10% chunks,” Chung said. “Our contracts right now get into basis point precision,” meaning they can reduce trades to 0.01% increments. Chung added that Titan’s aggregator is able to route through more pools than what Jupiter is capable of.

Titan’s approach is inspired by pathfinding in traditional equities markets where low-latency trading requires a “probabilistic” pathfinding approach, Chung said. 

Tech improvements aside, Jupiter also recently began charging a 0.1% fee on swaps, and Titan initially will not. I ran a few swaps on Titan in parallel to Jupiter swaps, and Titan’s aggregator did get me a better price each time. The price improvement is marginal if you’re moving a few cents around like me, but the improvement would be more noticeable with size.

That’s not to say switching to Titan will be a no-brainer for users. Jupiter’s aggregator includes quite a few memecoins that Titan’s does not, and Jupiter has a smoother UX. Jupiter still boasts a suite of features like perpetual futures, the JLP token, and recently-acquired businesses like the Moonshot memecoin platform. Plus, Titan is only in mainnet beta, and its better pricing algorithm is yet to face the wild.

But in any event, competition ideally creates better outcomes for users, and Jupiter is currently pretty unchallenged in the Solana DEX aggregation landscape. Solana traders will likely welcome any new protocol that’s able to swap one coin for another at a better price.

It strikes me that Solana’s newest battle between protocols has a mythological theme. In Roman mythology, Jupiter was king of the gods. The Greeks had Titan gods, though Titan will hope it can avoid their fate.

— Jack Kubinec

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Sphere Labs is building a staking-to-bank pipeline that takes a full-gait sidestep away from the inefficiencies we've come to associate with off-ramping to TradFi. Instead of waiting days for SWIFT transfers (while banks profit off your money in transit), Sphere's idea is to route epoch rewards straight to local bank accounts using stablecoins as the bridge. Faster settlement, fewer fees, instant liquidity — and if you use it you instantly become three standard deviations more handsome. We all know this. This is known.

The team now says it is working to tune Sphere’s validator client (which determines how efficiently a validator processes transactions and earns staking rewards) for top-tier yield while keeping fees at 0%. 

Takeaway: Pretty good competitive edge there, pre-inevitable monetization. A validator client that punches above its weight in performance while charging nothing is quite the deal. Will this hold up when scaled, or does gravity kick in?

— Jeffrey Albus

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