Momentum
Every project here has passed manual review. Rate, endorse, or distrust — your signal shapes what the Collective trusts.
Jupiter is the largest decentralized trading platform on Solana and the de-facto liquidity layer for the entire ecosystem. When you swap one token for another, Jupiter scans virtually every Solana exchange and liquidity source at once, then splits and routes your order across them to capture the best possible price — something no single exchange can do alone. Over time it has grown far beyond simple swaps to offer limit orders, automated dollar-cost-averaging, a perpetual-futures exchange and a token launchpad. Most Solana wallets and apps plug into Jupiter under the hood, which is why a very large share of all Solana trading volume flows through it. The JUP token is used for governance, letting holders shape how the protocol evolves and how its treasury is spent. Because so much of the ecosystem depends on it, Jupiter is widely treated as core infrastructure rather than just another app, and its health is often read as a proxy for Solana DeFi as a whole. For a newcomer, the simplest mental model is a smart router that always finds you the best trade automatically.
NEAR Protocol is a high-performance layer-1 blockchain designed for mainstream usability and, increasingly, for artificial intelligence. It was co-founded by Illia Polosukhin, one of the co-authors of the original Transformer research paper that underpins modern AI — a background the project leans into as it positions itself as an 'AI-native' blockchain. Technically, NEAR uses a sharding design (Nightshade) to scale by splitting work across the network, and it is known for a user-friendly account model with human-readable names that lowers the barrier for newcomers. More recently, NEAR has focused on 'chain abstraction' and NEAR Intents — infrastructure that lets users and AI agents transact across many blockchains without dealing with the underlying complexity. The vision is a network where autonomous AI agents can hold accounts, move value and coordinate across Web2 and Web3. The NEAR token powers the network: it pays for transactions, secures the chain through staking, and is used in governance, with fee mechanisms that can route value back to the token. For newcomers, think of NEAR as a scalable, easy-to-use layer-1 betting heavily on becoming the home base for on-chain AI.
Hyperliquid is a high-performance layer-1 blockchain built specifically for trading, best known for running a fully on-chain perpetual-futures exchange that feels as fast as a centralized one. Most decentralized derivatives platforms struggle to match centralized exchanges on speed and order-book depth; Hyperliquid's custom chain was designed from the ground up to solve exactly that, with a true on-chain order book and rapid settlement. It also added a general-purpose EVM (HyperEVM), so other DeFi apps can build on top of the same fast infrastructure. Notably, the project launched without traditional venture-capital backing and distributed a large airdrop of its HYPE token to early users, which built strong community goodwill. HYPE is the network's native token, and a meaningful share of the exchange's trading fees is used to buy back HYPE, tying the token's value to real platform usage. Hyperliquid grew into one of the dominant venues for on-chain perpetuals and attracted significant attention, including three US spot ETFs on HYPE launched in 2026 by 21Shares, Bitwise and Grayscale. For newcomers, think of Hyperliquid as a purpose-built trading blockchain whose token is fueled by the fees of its booming exchange.
