Jupiter's JUP Token Rockets to Top 10 DEX Minutes After Airdrop

Solana-based Jupiter has airdropped its JUP token, immediately becoming the sixth-largest decentralized exchange by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

JUP’s market cap was at $914 million within 30 minutes of its 10am EST launch, according to Coingecko. That would make it the sixth largest decentralized exchange. Jupiter is a Solana-based DEX aggregator.

JUP has bounced between an initial $0.86 and a low of $0.5, according to CoinGecko. It was hovering near $0.68 at the time of writing.

“The price is holding well,” said the project’s founder, who goes by meow, on a Space on X after the airdrop.

The airdrop of 1 billion tokens went to roughly 955,000 different wallet addresses. At the current price $0.68 that would make JUP a $680M airdrop, which would be the 10th largest in crypto’s history, beating out 1inch, according to a December report from CoinGecko.

Higher FDV Than Uniswap

JUP’s fully diluted value (FDV), which is the value of JUP if all of the token’s 10 billion supply was released, is $6.8 billion at current prices. That’s higher than Uniswap’s UNI $6.1 billion FDV. Uniswap is the largest DEX by volume and UNI has the highest market capitalization among DeFi protocols.

The total circulating supply of JUP is 1.35 billion with 250 million going to a launchpool, a Jupiter-developed product for releasing tokens, 50 million going to loans to market makers on centralized exchanges and 50 million for liquidity provision, according to a post from meow.

JUP tokens will be split 50-50 between the team and the broader community, according to meow’s post introducing the token.

At $661 million in volume the last 24 hours, Jupiter is the largest aggregator in crypto, according to DeFi Llama. The project also facilitated over 80% of decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on Solana, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.

Jupiter features other products outside its aggregator — it offers perpetuals, limit orders, and dollar-cost-averaging functionality. Meow’s post calls JUP a “full-stack ecosystem play.”

Zeta Markets launched perpetuals for Solana today.

Solana Revival

JUP’s launch comes amidst a revival of Solana in terms of SOL price, active addresses, and major partnerships. The founder has framed the token as a “symbol for DeFi 2.0” —a phrase which momentarily gained popularity in 2021— and is focused on pushing usage in crypto.

“Decentralized adoption is not when people buy crypto, it is when people use crypto,” he said on X in December.

JUP Utility

Meow has expressed an unconventional view on the airdropped token’s value.

“The initial value of JUP will be [a] symbol for Jupiter and DeFi 2.0, much as the value for UNI is a symbol for Uniswap DeFi 1.0, not from any utility,” he said in a response to an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on Reddit last month.

Meow is a colorful character — his personal site features original poems among his musings on cryptocurrency.

Moving forward, meow is open to the JUP token gaining utility.

“Things start changing in a few years tho, if we/solana/meta experiences 10x-100x growth, and the platform and the community scales along accordingly,” he said in the Reddit AMA. “Because then, JUP will have the chance to be the token for the entire Jupiter economy.”

Community Ownership

Tristan Frizza, CEO at Zeta Markets, the Solana based derivatives platform, is supportive of meow’s approach.

“JUP is a bold step towards full community ownership where value is accrued to the protocol by building a wide and committed community and strong ecosystem partners,” he told The Defiant. “By first growing the pie, Meow and team will create a strong base of distribution for their token and protocol, into which future utility can easily be layered."

For now, meow isn’t willing to change his stance on utility behind a token being a myth. “That's it, i refuse to overthink it, since cat brains are smol,” he said on Reddit.

[ With reporting help from Pedro Solimano.]