Originally, Jupiter was a team experiment, where we built a standalone program to integrate Mercurial and Serum to provide more utility for stables like $UST & $PAI and help establish them as key stables in Solana. In doing so, we launched the first cross-protocol liquidity swap on Solana.

Encouraged by our own dogfooding and the highly receptive response from the community (and the geeks in us loved playing with all the various networks, and solving all the tricky problems, like txn size limits, and all that good stuff), we decided to start Jupiter as a standalone project, launching in November 2021.

Along the way, we developed the JUP Promise to anchor us to the value we want to deliver - best price, best token selection, and best UX for users and developers. Sticking to this promise, along with the relentless feedback and debugging help provided by our community of users and developers, has been crucial in helping us improve the platform and make significant progress on key objectives.

We'd like to take the chance to share what these objectives are, the main challenges we had to solve to get here, and some of the cool things we have in the works. :D

1: Build the best swap experience in DeFi
With everyone's help, we've come a long way towards building one of the best aggregators in DeFi, with the goal of allowing anyone using Solana for the first time to have an amazing experience trading with the best price and best experience possible.

To have the most comprehensive liquidity coverage in Solana along with a seamless experience, there were a large number of technical challenges we had to solve, including fitting advanced swap routes within the transaction size limit of 1232 bytes and compute unit limits, and incorporating very different technical models like Serum’s orderbook mechanism, Lifinity’s rapidly updating oracle based pricing mechanism and Crema’s concentrated liquidity mechanism.

Over time, we have developed a very strong and flexible technical foundation (both on-chain and off-chain), as well as a solid process of working closely with other teams to overcome any initial technical challenges, sharing feedback and often working with them very early in their launch process to improve their platform and SDK, allowing us to roll out new integrations rapidly.

Now, we have the widest and most comprehensive liquidity coverage in Solana, having integrated over 15 DEXes into one seamless interface and SDK, including very technically different platforms like Serum, Orca, Lifinity, and Crema.

2: Be the swap infrastructure for Solana
To ensure the seamless and healthy flow of liquidity throughout the ecosystem, we work towards providing the most comprehensive and robust swap infrastructure possible for Solana for any user or project to reliably transact on.

We do so by providing a single liquidity endpoint where any users, dapp and protocol can seamlessly access all the available liquidity, achieving the best price and ux for their own projects, regardless of whatever platform or language they are using. This liquidity endpoint is accessible via 3 main mechanisms: A user facing website on jup.ag, a comprehensive and robust SDK and API, and onchain program instructions.

We have since built up an extremely diverse ecosystem of projects leveraging Jupiter for their swap needs, including top Solana projects like Mango, Tulip, Defi Land - ranging from native swaps in wallets to facilitating key DeFi use cases like vaults, liquidations, and payments.

3: Build one of the best communities in crypto
With over 50k community members across Twitter and Discord, we have built one of the best organic DeFi communities in Solana. Our community has been a cornerstone of Jupiter’s development and growth. This is true not just for product, but also in terms of evangelising, support, content contributions, and just plain vibe, making Jupiter a fun place to spend time connecting with others.

What makes our community so special is an amazing group of content creators and moderators who have created a lot of great content, spread a lot of great energy, answered questions, and also led a lot of events, including community AMAs, where we discuss various community members journey into crypto, international AMAs, etc.

Beyond that, our community has been essential at evangelising Jupiter to the other users and the ecosystem, with many of the most important integrations and partnerships have come because various members have spoken up and championed Jupiter in their respective communities, with Mango, DeFi Land, and Project Galaxy are just a few notable examples.

Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) has been a constant initiative for us to connect with key players in the ecosystem and vice versa, which eventually blossomed into some amazing partnerships. Not only that, it’s a really helpful platform for all of our community to learn more about DeFi protocols, NFTs, GameFi projects, and the Solana ecosystem in-depth. In the AMA series, we hosted some of the most talented guest speakers in Solana and garnered a wide range of audiences live on Twitter Spaces and Discord.

The series then continued on to morph into our very own podcast series - Exploring Solana with Jupiter - to reach a larger audience especially outside of Solana, for people to learn more about the community.

Our growing community of developers building on top of Jupiter have helped us be able to scale supporting the growing number of projects who all have different platforms and use cases they are building for. They’ve not only shared solutions that have worked but also code.