Metis Update

Over the past few months, we’ve worked on a set of upgrades to the Metis router that materially change how swaps get executed.

This isn’t incremental tuning. It’s a shift in how routing decisions are made, how latency is handled, and how much of the problem we push closer to execution time.

The goal is simple: what you get in your wallet should be as close as possible to the best price that existed when your transaction landed.

Here’s what changed.

Better Executed Prices

Quoted price is easy. Executed price is the one that matters, and most of our recent work has been closing the gap between the two.

Slippage Aware Routing

Markets move between quote and execution, and routes that look optimal can degrade before they land.

Real-Time Slippage Estimator (RTSE) analyzes every swap on every market to build a statistical model of expected slippage, and Metis router feeds that model into its routing decisions.

The system is no longer asking “what looks best right now?” Instead, it’s asking: “what is most likely to land best?”

Just-in-Time Routing

Several markets offer competitive prices which routing can choose from at any given moment. A better price may appear between quoting and execution, so committing to a route too early leaves edge on the table.

Metis router now carries multiple candidate routes into execution and finalizes splits on-chain, at the last possible moment. This reduces the gap between observed price and executed price in a way off-chain routing cannot.

Next week we'll publish a deeper dive on how we approach on-chain routing.

Latency & Timing: Winning the Slot

A meaningful part of execution quality is simply landing faster.

Several of these upgrades focus on reducing latency and operating closer to real-time chain state.

Fast Mode

For some swaps, speed matters more than optimization. If a hot token's price is moving fast, you don't want to spend another slot finding an extra $5 of edge.

On top of that, SOL ↔ USDC is a common intermediate hop with many competitive prices and marginal spread. Squeezing single-digit basis points there rarely matters when the output token itself dominates the eventual executed price.

Fast Mode skips those optimization steps and returns a quote in under 100ms, giving you a much better shot at landing in the next slot.

Low-Latency State

Routing quality is bounded by how fresh your view of the chain is.

Metis now runs on our own globally distributed gRPC streaming infrastructure, purpose-built for market data. It streams account updates, slot changes, and validator-level signals in real time.

We also leverage our own validator shreds, the 3rd largest in the network, giving us earlier visibility into block propagation.

The result is a router that reacts faster to state changes and operates closer to the actual chain at the moment of execution.

Liquidity Expansion: More Paths, Better Prices

Better execution also requires better access to liquidity.

Dynamic Intermediate Tokens

The best price often isn't a direct swap. Trade amounts get broken into splits, with each split routed through intermediate markets to maximize the tokens that end up in your wallet.

Tokens from liquid markets are added dynamically during each routing pass so that Metis router can take them into consideration, exhausting every combination before settling on a route.

This also unlocks new swap pairs such as JUICED ↔ Gold xStock, where Tether Gold is now added as an intermediate dynamically.

JupiterZ V2

Metis router didn't utilize JupiterZ V1's deep liquidity and zero slippage because V1 was only available as a standalone router inside our Meta-Aggregator.

With V2, it's integrated directly into Metis, bringing its full volume and unique offerings such as PreStocks into the main routing group with zero slippage on RFQ fills.

The bigger unlock: market maker orders can now function as a hop. JupiterZ liquidity isn't just a destination anymore, it's a path to other tokens, opening up routes and giving better prices that weren't previously possible.

Composable Actions: Routing Beyond Swaps

Routing is no longer limited to simple token exchanges.

Jupiter Lend (Mint & Redeem)

Metis can now route through mint and redeem operations directly.

This allows users to:

• Exit one yield position
• Enter another
• Do it in a single atomic transaction

No manual steps, no intermediate exposure.

What's Next

Our pipeline contains many exciting updates, so watch this space. If there's a routing behavior you'd like to see improved or a pair that isn't getting the price you expect, let us know. Feedback from you directly shapes what we ship next.