Why 90% of your DeFi trades are quietly being routed back to Wall Street market makers

Open Jupiter, tell it you want to swap SOL for USDC, check the price, and press the button. From the user's point of view, there is not much more to it.

So it's only natural to assume that Jupiter is where the trade happens. In reality, Jupiter is closer to a search engine for liquidity. Its software looks across different places willing to take the other side of the trade, compares what they are offering, and sends the order toward the best route it can find. Its current system can choose among ordinary decentralized exchanges, proprietary automated market makers, or propAMMs, and a request-for-quote network where professional market makers compete to quote a price.

The user sees one interface and one price, while underneath it several very different kinds of markets can be competing for the same order.

So the person selling you USDC might not be another user or a public pool funded by thousands of strangers. It could be a professional trading operation using its own money and pricing software, with no consumer-facing exchange and no pool into which you can deposit your own tokens. You never see most of that machinery; you just see the price that comes out of it.

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