While Solana's speed is widely acknowledged, the underlying projects fueling its decentralized finance (DeFi) surge are often overlooked. Several initiatives are quietly reshaping the Solana DeFi landscape, redefining liquidity, yield generation, and user control. Jito is revolutionizing staking rewards, Kamino is innovating yield strategies, Raydium is transforming liquidity into opportunities, and Meteora is enhancing capital efficiency. Solana is emerging not just as a fast blockchain but as a foundational blueprint for the future of DeFi, with an entire ecosystem working in synchrony to build the next phase of decentralized finance.
Jito ($JTO)
Jito ($JTO) operates as a staking platform for $SOL. Users who stake their $SOL with Jito receive its liquid staking token, $JitoSOL. This provides not only standard staking rewards but also a share of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) revenue from the Solana network. MEV refers to the maximum profit that can be extracted from block production by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block.
If 🫵💚 $SOL you’ll 💚 JitoSOL
By holding JitoSOL you:
• contribute to Solana’s decentralization
• earn additional rewards on idle capital
• provide economic security via restaking
• get access to DeFi incentive opportunitiesEarn smarter with JitoSOL. pic.twitter.com/SdCgWrHbTb
— Jito (@jito_sol) October 23, 2025
This mechanism ensures that staked capital remains liquid, as $JitoSOL can be utilized within the DeFi ecosystem for lending, providing liquidity, and other DeFi activities, while simultaneously earning both staking and MEV yields. This contrasts with traditional staking, where assets are typically locked.
Jito: the powerhouse of Solana.
$2.9B+ in TVL
97.87% Network Stake Weight on validator client
210 Top-Ranked Validators currently in the JitoSOL Pool (expanding to 400 top-ranked validators with the recent passing of JIP-25)🥩/acc pic.twitter.com/XfPfPtTfR4
— Jito (@jito_sol) October 13, 2025
Users can participate in Solana's DeFi ecosystem and benefit from staking rewards, thereby enhancing capital efficiency. Jito recently attracted significant institutional investment, securing $50 million from a16z, which underscores its perceived importance as infrastructure within the Solana ecosystem.
📣🚨NEWS: @a16zcrypto has made a $50M strategic investment in Jito!
With BAM live on mainnet, Jito’s growing momentum across DeFi, and institutional adoption continuing to accelerate via JitoSol ETF’s, things are just getting started.
Accelerate Jito. pic.twitter.com/pKGhLyvkdI
— Jito (@jito_sol) October 16, 2025
Jito holds a prominent position on DeFiLlama's TVL list for the Solana ecosystem. The current $JTO price is $0.56, with a market cap nearing $300 million, a significant decrease from its all-time high of $6 two years ago. As the broader Solana ecosystem grows, $JTO is poised for potential appreciation.
Kamino ($KMNO)
Kamino ($KMNO) is a comprehensive DeFi platform that integrates lending, liquidity provision, and leverage strategies into a single ecosystem. It offers automated liquidity vaults, lending and borrowing markets (K-Lend), and leveraged strategies such as long/short positions, multiplication, and looping. This unified approach eliminates the need to interact with multiple disparate protocols.
Kamino provides mechanisms for users to enhance yield on their assets. For liquidity providers, it offers:
- •Automated liquidity vaults.
- •Lending/borrowing markets (K-Lend).
- •Leveraged strategies (long/short, multiply, looping).
Within its ecosystem, users can access a wide array of DeFi tools. Kamino enables liquidity providers to utilize concentrated liquidity, which involves setting narrow price ranges for higher trading activity. This strategy, while requiring more active management and carrying increased risk of Impermanent Loss, significantly boosts capital efficiency and fee earnings.
Tracker With Reset:
Kamino’s Tracker With Reset strategy unlocks the full potential of volatile markets, proactively recalibrating market making ranges to align with real-time price movements.
Liquidity remains concentrated in high volume trading ranges, capturing optimal… pic.twitter.com/XMzzAK0q4z
— Kamino Liquidity (@kamino_liq) October 20, 2025
Kamino empowers users to maximize the productivity of their capital. However, effective use of concentrated liquidity requires a nuanced understanding of market dynamics to set optimal price ranges, and it increases the potential for Impermanent Loss, which is the temporary loss of funds due to price fluctuations in a liquidity pool.
Automated Drift Strategy:
Kamino’s Drift Strategy is designed to deterministically rebalance LST/SOL pairs at fixed intervals, based on the stake rate of the LST.
In simple terms, this enables tight ranges for highly concentrated liquidity, enhancing fee earnings, while… pic.twitter.com/DHq3hj6tOr
— Kamino Liquidity (@kamino_liq) October 20, 2025
Kamino ranks second in TVL on Solana according to DeFiLlama. The current $KMNO price is approximately $0.054, a notable 4x increase from its ATH of $0.25 in December 2024, presenting a potentially attractive entry point.
Raydium Protocol ($RAY)
Raydium Protocol ($RAY) is a decentralized exchange (DEX) featuring an automated market maker (AMM) model. It offers a range of functionalities including:
- •A Swap portal with a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) for on-chain order matching based on price and time priority, enabling CEX-like trading.
- •Liquidity pools with concentrated liquidity.
- •Yield farming.
- •Perpetual futures trading on a CLOB with up to 50x leverage.
- •Staking for $RAY with a 6% APR.
- •A launchpad for token issuance.
Raydium leverages Solana's core features, such as near-instant trades and minimal fees, which are essential for a DEX. The CLOB enhances liquidity depth, price efficiency, and reduces slippage. Users benefit from low transaction costs and rapid confirmations.
RAYDIUM : The DeFi Powerhouse on Solana 🦅
Not just a DEX, it’s the engine behind swaps, liquidity, and yields across the chain.
– ⚡ Super fast
– 💰 Low fees
– 🌐 Fully decentralized pic.twitter.com/T2P87VKA2t— junior.dip (@Juniordip0) October 13, 2025
Raydium also implements a buyback program, having already repurchased 27% of its circulating supply. A notable aspect of the platforms discussed is their exclusive focus on Solana. This highlights the strength of the Solana DeFi ecosystem but also raises questions about potential missed opportunities in cross-chain adoption.
Protocol and token holder alignment has long been a contentious topic. The recent news from Uniswap looking to adopt buybacks shows a maturation for DeFi and token ecosystems
As others explore alignment models, Raydium continues to lead:
27% of total $RAY supply has already… pic.twitter.com/hJrA7caBio
— Infra | Raydium (@0xINFRA) November 12, 2025
Raydium ranks sixth in TVL on Solana according to DeFiLlama. The current $RAY price is $1.56. Having reached $8.16 in January of this year and an all-time high of $16.83 four years ago, there is potential for significant recovery.
Meteora ($MET)
Meteora ($MET), formerly known as Mercurial Finance, rebranded in 2023 and shifted its focus to becoming a dynamic liquidity infrastructure layer. It utilizes technologies like a Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM), which automatically adjusts liquidity and fees based on market volatility. This design enhances capital efficiency for both traders and liquidity providers, enabling LPs to maximize returns while managing risk, making capital work more effectively than in traditional AMM pool models.
Dynamic Fees are the single most powerful force in DLMM LP’ing.
The LP Army lives for this feature, but most people still don’t realise how underrated it is and how it lets our LPs cook harder than anywhere else in crypto.
Here’s a quick breakdown and what you should know. pic.twitter.com/Cnk2eWj7T5
— Meteora (@MeteoraAG) November 10, 2025
Meteora is built as a modular infrastructure layer, allowing other dApps, aggregators, and launchpads on Solana to integrate with it. This integration aims to boost liquidity, improve user experience, and enhance interoperability across the Solana chain. Meteora functions as a foundational layer for Solana's broader DeFi ecosystem.
The platform launched its $MET token in October, introducing new tokenomics and ecosystem distribution. The current $MET price is $0.425, showing a 41% increase over the last seven days. After one month, 47% of its token supply is in circulation. Meteora ranks tenth in TVL on Solana according to DeFiLlama.
The wait is over.
The MET TGE will be a pivotal moment for Meteora and the debut of the most revolutionary token launch tech ever.
We know you’ve been waiting.
The Meteora official launch pool range + the answer to the ultimate question… “wen Checker?”
16.10.2025 12PM UTC pic.twitter.com/COkd9S8180
— Meteora (@MeteoraAG) October 15, 2025
Which Solana DeFi platform do you prefer? Share your thoughts in the comments.