An Ethereum-based protocol that has been inactive for seven years experienced a surge in price following the airdrop announcement for Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter. The Ethereum-based token with the ticker JUP saw its price increase by over 430% on January 31, only to drop back down later. CoinMarketCap data shows that the price rose from $0.005 to $0.026 before returning to its current price of $0.007. The Ethereum-based Jupiter protocol was launched in 2017 for creating and hosting decentralized applications (DApps), but it is no longer active. In contrast, the Solana-based Jupiter is a decentralized exchange aggregator that enables users to swap tokens, place limit orders, and implement dollar-cost averaging strategies on the Solana network.
The surge in price for the Ethereum-based JUP coincided with the launch of the airdrop for the Solana-based Jupiter, which distributed approximately $700 million to early users. The airdrop, one of the largest ever on Solana, went smoothly according to a Solana Foundation executive. Austin Federa, the head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, stated that the network handled a total of 2.5 million non-vote transactions within the first two and a half hours of the Jupiter claims going live. Although gas fees on the Solana network spiked during the claiming frenzy, Federa humorously mentioned that they reached an “astronomical fee” of 0.01 SOL, equivalent to roughly $1.02 at current prices. He compared this to the significantly higher gas fees paid by Ethereum network users during popular airdrops.
However, there were some complaints from users of third-party apps like Phantom Wallet and Solflare during the initial hour of the airdrop. Federa clarified that the issue was with the remote procedure call (RPC) nodes, which act as the interface between user wallets and the network, rather than the base layer of Solana itself. He emphasized that the base layer and RPC layer of Solana remained stable, with validators continuing to produce blocks in the network.
In the meantime, a seventeen-year-old pseudonymous investor known as X, who goes by the handle “notshort,” claimed to have earned over $1 million from the Solana-based JUP airdrop. As of now, 41% of eligible wallets have claimed their JUP tokens, with a total of 566 million JUP (57% of the total airdrop allocation) being claimed since the airdrop began on January 31 at 10:00 am Eastern Time, according to data from Osk2020 on Dune Analytics. Within the first hour, over 176,000 wallets claimed their airdrop.