In JIP-2, the Jito Foundation requested 7.5m JTO for the purpose of liquidity mining (LM) after working with research firm Gauntlet to develop an evaluation framework for the success of LM campaigns.
Since the passing of JIP-2, the Foundation has directed 985,500 JTO tokens to various liquidity mining campaigns, with the vast majority (757,500 JTO) focused on Kamino vaults.
The vaults have been essential in maintaining JitoSOL’s status as the most liquid LST in Solana DeFi. Additionally, the Foundation focused on incentivizing new Solana DeFi token launches, peaking at eight concurrent vault strategies in mid-May:
A number of these strategies proved to be successful in attracting sustained TVL on a medium-term time horizon, even after incentives ended, which points to a strategy of expanding vault spend to focus on successful Solana ecosystem tokens.
The JUP-JitoSOL vault is one such example, which maintained over $10m in liquidity after incentives ended, and maintains $2M in liquidity today:
Aside from Kamino vaults, spend has been contained to a campaign with lossless lottery protocol Zelo (8k), DeFi interface layer Infinex (20k), and a forthcoming campaign from Phantom (200k). All expenditures can be tracked here.
To date, the Jito Foundation has been conservative with the spend, but has planned a more aggressive JTO budget for the next two months. The Jito Foundation remains active in tracking down new opportunities in DeFi for JitoSOL users, and the launch of (Re)staking will also present new avenues to incentivize DeFi utilization and expand TVL.
However, it is unlikely that the full budget will be utilized, and as a result the majority of the allocated funds will be returned to the DAO. This will likely be reflected in a more modest overall 2025 liquidity mining budget request.