Jupiter, a decentralized exchange built on the Solana blockchain, has experienced a surge in trading volumes, reaching $480 million in the last 24 hours. This spike in activity can be attributed to the excitement surrounding a new memecoin airdrop and increased swaps involving stablecoins.
Interestingly, Jupiter has surpassed the trading volumes of Uniswap, both in its v2 and v3 protocols, by $10 million. Combined, the trading volume of Uniswap’s protocols amounted to only $470 million in the same time period, according to CoinGecko data.
Out of the total daily trading volume on Jupiter, approximately $50 million came from the buying and selling of Wen, the new memecoin. This coin was airdropped to Solana users who had interacted with Jupiter within the past six months, as well as owners of Solana’s Saga phone.
The development of Wen was an experiment conducted by Jupiter developers, leading up to the highly anticipated airdrop of the exchange’s native token, JUP, scheduled for launch on January 31.
However, the majority of trading volume on Jupiter in the past 24 hours involved the swapping of Solana’s SOL for USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT), which accounted for $191 million of the total volume.
Currently, pre-market JUP tokens are trading at around $0.61. This suggests that the estimated total value of the 1 billion token JUP airdrop could exceed $600 million at current prices, according to data from perpetuals traded on the decentralized exchange Aevo.
The excitement in the market surrounding Wen and JUP coincides with a series of airdrops announced by various projects in the crypto ecosystem. For instance, AltLayer, an Ethereum scaling solution, recently announced a $100 million airdrop to its users. Additionally, Dymension, a multilayer rollup deployer, plans to launch its mainnet soon and will airdrop a total of 70 million DYM tokens, worth approximately $210 million at pre-market prices, to eligible users.
The enthusiasm surrounding these airdrops highlights the ongoing trend in the crypto industry.