Jupiter vs Raydium and Why the Smaller Token Rose 41% While Jupiter Earned More

Jupiter and Raydium are both Solana DeFi protocols with governance tokens. Jupiter routes your trade across every pool on the chain for the best price. Raydium is one of those pools. Think of it as the difference between a price-comparison site and a shop.

Jupiter vs Raydium at a Glance

RAY closed Sunday 6 September 2026 at $1.284 on Phemex spot, up 40.79% from Saturday's $0.912. JUP closed at $0.2765, up 25.80% from $0.2198. Over 30 sessions the gap widens to 107.10% against 53.61%.

So the smaller token outran the bigger one, and it did so while the bigger one collected half again as much in fees. Those are two different businesses, and the numbers below say which one the market repriced.

What Is Jupiter?

Jupiter is Solana's largest trade aggregator. You tell it what you want to swap, it splits the order across the pools that give the best fill, and you never pick a venue.

The Jupiter entity page covers the routing mechanics in more depth than this comparison needs.

Aggregation is no longer the whole company. Jupiter also runs a perpetual exchange, a lending market, a staked SOLproduct and a prediction market, and the perps line is where most of the money comes from.

JUP is the governance token. Per CoinGecko, 3,320,312,968 of a 10 billion maximum are circulating, which is a 33.2% float with the rest scheduled or unissued.

What Is Raydium?

Raydium is an AMM. Liquidity providers deposit two assets, traders swap against that pool, and a fee is charged on every swap. Our Raydium entity page predates most of what matters here.

Three pool types run side by side. Concentrated liquidity pools and constant-product pools take tiers of 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.25% or 1%, and the legacy Standard AMM v4 pools take 0.25%.

Raydium also runs LaunchLab, a bonding-curve launchpad that charges 1% on buys and sells before a token graduates to a full pool. Opening a constant-product or Standard AMM v4 pool costs 0.15 SOL, which works as a spam filter rather than a revenue line.

RAY is capped at 555 million and 269.5 million of that is circulating.

Which Token Moved More Over the Week to Sunday 6 September?

RAY, and by a wide margin. Seven sessions to the anchor close it added 67.19% from $0.768 on Sunday 30 August, against 34.48% for JUP from $0.2056 over the identical window on the same feed.

The moving averages tell you this is recent. Computed from the Phemex spot closing series, RAY's 50-session average crossed above its 200-session average on Thursday 27 August 2026.

The gap at the anchor is a thin +3.82%, with the 50-session at $0.69898 against the 200-session at $0.67324. JUP crossed on Saturday 30 May 2026 and carries a +4.84% gap.

There is a dated reason. The Block's report on StonkFun and Raydium, dated Sunday 6 September 2026, says the launchpad had announced the previous day that its new deployments would run through Raydium's LaunchLab. STONK reached roughly a $140 million cap.

Our StonkFun hub carries the launchpad detail and the tokenized-stock angle behind it.

What matters for this comparison is where the flow lands. LaunchLab tokens graduate into Raydium pools, so the fees hit Raydium's own accounts, while Jupiter routes across them and takes a thinner slice.

Which Protocol Earns More and What Layer Is That Number From?

Jupiter, on the fee line. Across all its products over the 30 sessions to Sunday 6 September, DefiLlama shows $18.53 million, of which the perpetual exchange contributed $9.27 million, the aggregator $3.62 million, lending $3.52 million and staked SOL $1.87 million.

Raydium over the same window shows $12.14 million.

But two of those numbers cannot be divided by each other, and that is the trap.

Jupiter's $14.85 billion of 30-day volume is aggregator routing volume. Raydium's $4.39 billion is pool executionvolume. A share of Raydium's total is Jupiter's routed flow arriving at the pool, counted once at each layer.

Adding them together is like paying a taxi fare and the train ticket it fed into and calling that two trips.

The daily bars show where the weekend landed. Raydium's Sunday volume ran $409.32 million against $155.88 million on Friday 4 September, a jump of 2.6x. Jupiter's Sunday aggregator volume was $551.75 million against $432.63 million, up 28%.

Both series come from DefiLlama and both backfill for a day or two after a bar closes, so a figure you read on Monday can move by Wednesday. Check the source before you build a position on it.

The fee lines split the same way. Raydium's $12.14 million is the whole pool fee, and 84% to 88% of it is liquidity-provider earnings rather than protocol revenue.

Applying the 12% buyback share leaves roughly $1.5 million of actual RAY buying over the month. Jupiter's figure is mostly perpetual-trading fees, a different product entirely.

What Does Each Protocol Do With Its Fees?

Raydium sends 84% of the swap fee to liquidity providers, 12% to buying RAY and 4% to treasury on concentrated and constant-product pools, per the protocol fee documentation. Standard AMM v4 pools split 88% and 12% with no treasury cut.

That buyback is checkable. Reading the Solana mainnet on Monday 7 September 2026, the buyback wallet ending in VEZaz held 85,154,827 RAY across its token accounts, worth about $109 million at the anchor close.

Against the 269.5 million circulating count that is 31.59%, which agrees with what Raydium stated on Monday 31 August 2026 about passing 30% of the float.

Jupiter routes 50% of its onchain revenue to the Litterbox Trust, which has burned roughly 134 million JUP to date, per its tokenomics documentation.

Co-founder Siong Ong said more than $70 million went to buybacks during 2025, and on Monday 5 January 2026 he publicly questioned the case for continuing, as reported by crypto.news.

Risks of Trading JUP and RAY

JUP's Float Is One Source Counted Twice

CoinGecko prints 3,320,312,968 circulating, CoinMarketCap prints the identical digits, and Jupiter's own docs point you at CoinMarketCap. No independent third count turned up. RAY's two counts differ by 0.53%, which is the healthier signal.

A Buyback Has Never Been a Price Floor

Jupiter's co-founder made that point himself. More than $70 million of buying stood behind a token that closed Sunday 86.2% below its all-time high. RAY's 31.59% of float is genuine supply off the market and it is still 92.4% below September 2021.

The Launchpad Flow Is One Weekend Old

Raydium's Sunday fee bar ran $2.54 million against $475,774 on Saturday and roughly $400,000 a day the week before. Nothing on the tape tells you the StonkFun routing persists past one weekend, and you should size the position that way.

One Product Against Six

Raydium's revenue depends on swaps in its own pools. Jupiter spreads across perps, lending, staking and prediction. Concentration cuts both ways, and it is the reason RAY moved harder in both directions.

RAY Has No Phemex Perpetual

You can buy RAY on Phemex spot. There is no live RAY perpetual contract, so leverage on the Raydium side of this trade is not available on the exchange, while JUP-USDT trades as a perpetual at up to 50x.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Raydium a better buy than Jupiter?

They're different bets rather than grades of the same one. RAY is a capped, shrinking supply tied to one product. JUP is a diluting supply on a wider revenue base. Neither is safer.

Does holding RAY pay you a share of Raydium's fees?

No. The 12% buyback share purchases RAY into a protocol-controlled wallet rather than distributing to holders. Your benefit is a slowly shrinking float, not a yield.

Why did RAY rise more than JUP on Sunday 6 September?

LaunchLab flow lands directly in Raydium's fee accounts, while Jupiter routes across pools for a thinner cut. RAY also carries one third of JUP's market cap, so the same dollars move it further.

What is Raydium LaunchLab?

A bonding-curve launchpad that charges 1% on buys and sells before a token graduates into a full pool. Graduated tokens land in Raydium's own pools, so those swap fees hit Raydium's accounts.

Bottom Line

The number to follow is Raydium's daily fee bar against its pre-announcement baseline near $400,000. Two or three more sessions above $1 million says the LaunchLab routing is structural, and roughly 12% of every one of those dollars turns into RAY buying at market.

A drop back under $500,000 says one weekend of STONK.

On the Jupiter side, watch the perpetual-exchange fee line, because that is half of the $18.53 million and the Litterbox Trust's burn depends on it. Both moving-average gaps are thin enough, +3.82% for RAY and +4.84% for JUP, that a flat week erases either cross.

The market paid you more over the week to Sunday 6 September for the smaller, capped, single-product token than for the larger, diversified one. That trade works while the launchpad flow lasts, and only while it lasts.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.