Solana firm Jito launches a consumer trading app months after raising $50 million

Over the past four years, crypto startup Jito has made its name building infrastructure for the Solana blockchain network. But coming off of a banner 2025, Jito is no longer content to remain on the back end of crypto trading and plans to launch a consumer-facing trading app, called JTX, in July. 

The app will offer spot trading to start, with integrations for perpetual futures and prediction markets to come. It marks Jito’s entrance into the consumer trading space, a sector that has minted some of crypto’s biggest breakouts but is becoming increasingly crowded by new entrants.

Founded in 2021, Jito has 39 employees across two entities and “well north of $100 million” in cash on hand, CEO and co-founder Lucas Bruder said in an interview with Fortune. 

The company’s fortunes have soared in recent months. After Donald Trump launched his memecoin on the Solana network in January 2025, Jito hauled in nearly $6 million in revenue in a week by processing trades on Solana, according to data from crypto analytics firm Blockworks. 

Jito’s recent run has spurred interest from investors, including the crypto arm of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $50 million in Jito last October. 

Buoyed by this war chest, Jito aims to make an app capable of putting its own vision for onchain trading into practice, rather than being beholden to the existing apps that rely on the company’s infrastructure.

“We don’t really want to wait for other people to make things better above us,” Bruder said. “We’re just going to go and do it ourselves.”

At launch, JTX will offer spot trading on the Solana network. It later plans to integrate perpetual futures, a sector currently dominated by buzzy startup Hyperliquid, by way of an integration with a Solana-based exchange named Phoenix. It will also offer prediction markets via a yet-unlaunched prediction market being built on Solana, Bruder said. 

This isn’t Jito’s first consumer product. The firm offers a liquid staking token, which is essentially a wrapper on yield-bearing Solana tokens, that has a market capitalization over $800 million. But by launching a consumer app, Jito will try to sidestep the pitfalls of prior crypto infrastructure firms—many of which raised funds at lofty valuations but failed to fully meet those expectations.

“I think we’ll see a lot more infra companies either completely pivot into more retail-facing applications, or you’ll see more start to dogfood and build stuff on top of their current [infra],” Bruder said. “I think you can fall into this trap—the saying ‘build it and they will come.’ If you’re kind of just waiting around for others to come, and you’re relying on third parties that have their own priorities … it puts you in a weird place.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com