Olivia Capozzalo & Denis Omelchenko
February 23, 2026

Happy Monday, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

A governance vote at Jupiter DAO just saw token holders approve a plan to pause new JUP emissions and future airdrops.

In other news

Fusaka fuels increased address poisoning: research
85% of new tokens in 2025 finished the year in the red
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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$66,197	-2.07 %
Ethereum	$1,922.44	-1.56 %
XRP	$1.41	0.11 %
BNB	$609.11	-1.76 %
Solana	$80.68	-3.89 %

Today’s Big Story

Jupiter DAO Cuts Token Emissions to Zero, Freezes Airdrops

A governance vote at Jupiter DAO saw token holders approve a plan to pause new JUP emissions and future airdrops. The DAO oversees development of Jupiter, the largest protocol on Solana by total value locked.

The vote ended yesterday, Feb. 22, and drew more than 480 million votes. About 75% supported a package that delays Jupuary — Jupiter’s annual governance airdrop — and pauses new token emissions. It also limits selling from early investors tied to Mercurial, the project Jupiter was originally built from.

An alternative option to move ahead with Jupuary as planned drew only about 25% of the vote and didn’t pass.

JUP 7-day price chart. Source: CoinGecko

Amid the vote, which kicked off on Jan. 17, JUP’s price dropped about 8% to $0.15 while the broader market also slipped, per data from CoinGecko.

As part of the decision, around 700 million JUP tokens — worth around $105 million — that had been set aside for Jupuary will be moved into the community cold multisig wallet. Those tokens can’t be used unless the DAO approves a new vote later on.

The plan also changes how the team is paid in tokens. Team members will no longer receive JUP directly. Instead, they will receive an internal credit, and Jupiter will buy the tokens itself if any of those allocations are sold, keeping them off the open market.

A similar approach applies to Mercurial stakeholders, who hold about 5% of the total JUP supply. Their tokens will keep vesting, but if they sell JUP to exchanges, Jupiter says it will “offset any sell pressure by purchasing an equivalent amount of JUP.”

Together, these steps are expected to cut projected new emissions from about 1.2 billion JUP to near zero, while separate buybacks, funded by half of Jupiter’s on-chain revenue, will continue as before.

Jupiter’s TVL is currently just over $2 billion and the platform combines on-chain lending, swaps and perpetual futures trading on Solana. After launching in beta just this summer, Jupiter Lend saw its TVL quickly surge above $500 million. It’s currently sitting above $1 billion, only trailing Kamino Lend with $1.7 billion.

Denis, staff reporter at The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

Why DAO Governance Always Turns Political

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami sits down with Rune Christensen to discuss why DAO governance becomes a struggle for resources, how the "iron law of bureaucracy" emerges, and why Sky redesigned its architecture to survive it.

Watch the full interview:

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