Of the 2 million users who qualified for the airdrop, roughly 503,000 addresses have claimed about $200 million worth of JUP tokens.
JUP is the governance token for the Jupiter DAO, enabling holders to vote on a range of proposals regarding the protocol’s ecosystem.
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Posted January 23, 2025 at 1:50 pm EST.
Jupiter, a major decentralized exchange on Solana that has become one of the most closely-watched projects in the blockchain’s fast-growing ecosystem, appears to have successfully managed its latest airdrop, increasing its market capitalization by 87% to nearly $3.5 billion.
The airdrop, one of the crypto industry’s biggest this year, started early Wednesday with an allocation of 700 million total JUP tokens to users. In the first day, traders representing a half-million wallet addresses had claimed 251 million JUP worth about $200 million, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Flipside Crypto.
Claims for the highly-anticipated airdrop will remain open until April 30, according to the airdrop’s landing website.
An airdrop is a popular mechanism crypto projects use to distribute tokens en masse to users, and traders love them because they represent free money given out in exchange for early usage of blockchain projects that are often experimental and trying to build critical mass.
Jupiter’s new market capitalization ranks JUP as the 49th biggest cryptocurrency overall, but project officials touted the airdrop as one of the largest ever in terms of participation, with some 2 million total qualifying wallet addresses.
Claiming and Staking
“500,000 addresses actively doing a claim() function is amazing,” Carlos Mercado, a data scientist at blockchain analytics firm Flipside Crypto, wrote to Unchained over Telegram. “That shows how many people are engaged with the ecosystem.”
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Mercado acknowledged that “sybil is rampant,” a nod to the idea that users may have created multiple wallet addresses to maximize their airdrop rewards. Jupiter’s website shows that it ruled out about 8 million wallet addresses from the airdrop eligibility, in an effort to curb any efforts to game the system.
Some 84% of the claimants elected to stake their tokens, Mercado noted, perhaps a sign of enduring loyalty to the project on the part of crypto traders as opposed to just a quick cash grab.
Jupiter’s main contributors said that the purpose of the airdrop was to grow the community, further decentralize the protocol, and incentivize ongoing participation.
JUP is the governance token for the Jupiter DAO, enabling holders to vote on a range of proposals regarding the protocol’s ecosystem. In December, JUP token holders voted for two additional airdrops, including this week’s. The next is slated for 2026.
The JUP token went live in early 2024 with an initial airdrop, with about 1 billion tokens allocated to about 955,000 addresses. The price of JUP has fallen 1.5% in the last 24 hours to trade at 79 cents, data from CoinGecko shows.
Jupiter is a decentralized exchange and the third-largest protocol built on Solana by total value locked at $2.8 billion, trailing Raydium and Jito, per DefiLlama.
