On Jupiter’s $700M Airdrop, Traders Throw Another ‘JUP’ Out
The seven-year-old Ethereum-based protocol could benefit from a short-term $700 million airdrop for Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter due to the same price tag.
On January 31st, hours before Solana-based Jupiter's JPI airdrop, the same Ethereum-based token surged more than 430% before plunging a few hours later.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, the price of Ethereum-based JUP rose to $0.026 on January 30 before falling from $0.005 to $0.007 on January 31.
In the year Launched in 2017, Ethereum-based Jupiter is a protocol designed to create and host decentralized applications (DApps), but its official website says the protocol is “no longer active.”
On the other hand, Solana-based Jupiter is a decentralized exchange aggregator that allows users to exchange, place orders, and deploy dollar-cost averaging purchase strategies across the Solana network.
The move to slash the Ethereum-based price comes just hours before Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter filed a claim for nearly $700 million in airdrops to early adopters.
Solana clears millions of “voiceless” transactions within hours.
A Solana Foundation executive said the Jupiter airdrop — the largest to ever hit Solana — went off without incident.
Jupiter Realm: Jupuri 2024
1. The most used trading platform in defi2. Direct 80% organic volume3. The most used program in Solana4. Top 2 in votes by Coingecko5. A highly integrated platform on Solana6. One of the best platforms ($1.4B volume last week)
Deets:… pic.twitter.com/UEnwgyc2eu
— Jupiter (@JupiterExchange) January 30, 2024
Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, told Cointelegraph that Solana Network's Jupiter performed impressively, handling a total of 2.5 million voiceless transactions in the two and a half hours it went live.
Federa jokingly added that while the claims are high because of the dramatic increase in Solana (SOL) gas fees, gas at the current price of approximately $1.02 0.01 SOL has reached an “astronomical fee.”
Federa compared this to the higher gas fees users of the Ethereum network will pay in March 2022 for popular airdrops such as ApeCoin.
“If you look at the Epicoin AirDrop, it was probably the biggest Ethereum AirDrop, where people were paying $3,500 in gas fees to claim.”
However, the airdrop incident saw a lot of complaints from users of third-party apps like Phantom Wallet and Solflare in the first hour of the airline. Federa says the issue is the remote procedure call (RPC) nodes — the interface between user wallets and the network — and not Solana's underlying layer.
“The basic layer 1 held up as you would expect during a lot of user activity, the RPC layer was fine – mostly untouched – and validators continued to create blocks in the network,” Federa said.
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Meanwhile, a 17-year-old pretend crypto investor made more than $1 million from a Solana-based JUP airdrop, according to an investor who goes by the handle X.
Of all eligible wallets, 41% claimed their JUP tokens, and a total of 566 million JUP – 57% of the total allocation of Weather – were claimed as of 10:00 AM ET on January 31st. Data from Osk2020 to Dune Analytics.
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