Solana-Based Jupiter (JUP) Token Slumps 70% On Debut After $700 Million Airdrop

Updated: 01 February 2024

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage

Jupiter (JUP) slumped as much as 70% on its debut after conducting one of the largest airdrops on the Solana blockchain, with around $700 million worth of JUP tokens distributed to nearly one million wallets.

The token started trading yesterday at around $0.41 and, within a few hours, surged to $2 before its slump. It’s since pared losses and is down 14% as of 1 p.m. EST to trade at $0.5877. Its market cap stands at $793 million.

Trading volume was an astronomical $1.37 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

An Ethereum-based token with the same ticker also jumped by over 400% yesterday briefly before dumping as investors seemingly mistook it for SOL’s JUP.

JUP Token Airdrop

JUP allocated one billion tokens for its initial airdrop. Data from Dune shows 625 million JUP tokens have been claimed so far with 47% of the eligible wallet addresses having claimed their share of the airdrop. About 20% of the airdrop tokens were claimed within the first hour.

The tokens will go towards early users of the Jupiter protocol.

This airdrop is not the last for the Jupiter protocol. It has allocated an additional 3 billion JUP tokens for future airdrops targeting new users. The protocol has yet to announce the timing of future drops.

Systems Hold Up

Given the size of the airdrop, there were initial concerns that it would wreak havoc on Jupiter systems and cause downtime on the Solana blockchain. But the network has been hailed for maintaining a 100% uptime.

🚨 BREAKING: Solana maintains 100% uptime during the peak traffic of $JUP Jupiter airdrop claim and trading. pic.twitter.com/3tWaOX9yqU

— SolanaFloor | Powered by Step Finance (@SolanaFloor) January 31, 2024

The crypto community has also praised the fee mechanism on the Solana blockchain. Despite the increased user number and demand, gas fees remained low.

Here is the fee I just paid for a transaction on the Solana network. Even with the massive influx of users claiming their JUP token airdrop, there are no gas spikes. This truly feels like the future. pic.twitter.com/sRFVV0g3pu

— SmartecVitalik (@Smartecio) January 31, 2024

But the launch was not without some minor issues. Users using third-party apps like Solflare and Phantom reported issues claiming the tokens during the first 30 minutes.

The problem stemmed from RPC nodes, which link user wallets and the blockchain. The issue was not present on the Solana base layer.