Getting Rich Slow in Crypto: Kash Dhanda on Solana, Stablecoins and the Future of Onchain Finance
In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with @kashdhanda, COO at @jupiterexchange, to discuss what it actually takes to build wealth in crypto without relying on memecoins, moonshots, or getting lucky. We unpack why Kash believes crypto is still far earlier than many investors realize, his idea of “infinite capitalism,” why more than half of his own portfolio sits in yield-earning stablecoins, and why he sees @solana evolving into the “everything chain” for our financial lives. More than anything, the conversation is about a crypto market that is growing up, and the mindset investors may need to grow up with it.
From Crypto’s Early Experiments to Real Scale
Kash first got involved in crypto in 2016, but his deeper immersion came in 2021 when he joined the founding team of @superteam, helping build what he describes as the talent layer for Solana. That put him alongside thousands of builders around the world and gave him an unusually broad view of what people were experimenting with, what was actually gaining traction, and where the real problems were. Today, as COO of Jupiter, he is seeing those same ideas operate at a completely different scale.
His conviction in Solana also came from an earlier background in human-centered design. Kash describes technology as progressing from being useful, to usable, to actually being used. Crypto had discovered useful ideas years ago, from stablecoins to prediction markets and new forms of capital formation, but the experience was expensive, slow, and difficult. Solana, to him, represented the move into the usable phase: fast, cheap, and composable enough that interacting with crypto no longer had to feel like taking a step backward from traditional financial products. Kash thinks crypto is now standing at another transition point.
Crypto Is Crossing the Chasm
There is a common belief that the enormous opportunity in crypto has already passed. Kash strongly disagrees. He borrows from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm to argue that crypto is only now moving from its innovators and true believers toward the early majority. Traditional financial institutions no longer need to be convinced that blockchain exists. Their questions are becoming much more practical: Where are the users? Where does liquidity come from? What is genuinely better about putting this activity onchain?
And that is precisely why Kash thinks the opportunity remains so huge. Institutional experiments that sound enormous inside crypto are still tiny relative to traditional finance. In his view, the industry has made extraordinary progress while remaining small compared with the financial system it could eventually touch.
Kash calls his framework “infinite capitalism”: a future of infinite access to infinite assets, where anyone, anywhere can participate in global capital markets and almost anything capable of being tokenized eventually is. But infinite assets don’t mean infinite attention or liquidity. The old strategy of buying almost anything and watching it rise becomes less viable. Real products, trustworthy teams, and assets positioned around meaningful trends will matter much more.
The Real Crypto Wealth Strategy Is Surprisingly Boring
That brings us to perhaps the most useful part of the conversation: How do you actually get rich in crypto without luck? “It takes discipline more than anything else,” Kash says.
His advice is almost the opposite of what culture crypto often rewards. Remove emotion. Decide entries and exits before entering a position. Stop allowing Twitter to define reality. Find people with genuinely differentiated knowledge and learn from them. Five years ago, he says, his advice might have been to stay online for 18 hours a day. Today, he would tell people to attend events, meet smart people, ask difficult questions and learn from the experiences of others.
He is equally skeptical of memecoin ideology.
“Memecoins are video games,” Kash says. “They provide adrenaline as a service.” It means they should be understood for what they are: highly speculative, often temporary assets rather than a dependable path to wealth. The mistake is turning an occasional high-risk bet into the foundation of a portfolio.
His alternative is compounding.
Kash argues that one of crypto’s most underestimated opportunities is yield, particularly on stablecoins. More than 50% of his own portfolio is currently in stablecoins earning yield, acting as the conservative side of a barbell against risky crypto positions. He believes consistently earning five, six, or seven percent on capital while carefully managing protocol risk can do more for long-term wealth than constantly chasing another 100x trade.
“Getting rich slow in crypto is actually the move”.
Solana as the “Everything Chain”
For 2026, Kash calls Solana the “everything chain” because it can potentially support stablecoins, tokenized equities, real-world assets, institutional finance, retail trading, and whatever comes next. Its real advantage, in his view, is its ability to keep improving and coordinate technological changes across the network. The larger bet is that people will eventually conduct much more of their financial lives onchain. And if Solana becomes the infrastructure beneath that world, Jupiter wants to become its interface.
Kash describes Jupiter today as an “onchain finance super app”: one place to trade, earn and use assets. Its expansion into lending, stablecoins, spending, portfolio management and GUM, its Global Unified Markets initiative, reflects a broader belief that the era of managing DeFi through ten different browser tabs is ending. The winner may be the platform that makes a complex financial system feel simple enough for ordinary users while remaining powerful enough for institutions.
Fixing the Token Story While Building for the Long Term
Jupiter’s future also depends on something Kash admits the team did not handle well enough in the last cycle: translating Jupiter’s business growth into success for $JUP. Now, Jupiter treats JUP more like a product in its own right, with more attention to token holders, clearer communication around its long-term strategy, and stronger alignment between the business and the asset, including directing 50% of Jupiter’s revenues toward JUP buybacks.
The team is also trying to signal that it is building beyond a single market cycle, with co-founder @weremeow, for example, locking his tokens until 2030. Yet that long-term ambition does not require treating every competing platform as an enemy. When Hyperliquid comes up, Kash starts with respect for what its small team has built, particularly its product execution, token design and ability to create a deeply invested community. Jupiter’s response is not simply to attack or copy it, but to learn, differentiate and compete through products like GUM. Kash points to Jupiter’s partnerships with @ethena, @0xfluid and others as evidence of a broader philosophy: in an increasingly crowded onchain market, collaboration can sometimes create more value than pure competition.
Crypto’s Next Chapter Is About Staying Power
Perhaps the best way to understand Kash’s thesis is that crypto does not need another cycle built entirely on excitement. It needs products people continue using after the excitement disappears.
“Onchain finance is not a fad.” After FTX, he says, there was still a legitimate question about whether the industry would recover. He no longer has that fear. Bitcoin has global awareness, major institutions are developing onchain strategies, and the products themselves continue improving.
The question, in his view, is no longer whether onchain finance survives, but how big it becomes, how quickly it gets there, and who has the discipline to stay around long enough to benefit from it.
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