Traders pumped and dumped another ‘JUP’ during $700M Jupiter airdrop

A seven-year-old defunct Ethereum-based protocol may have briefly benefitted from the $700 million airdrop for Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter due to its similar price ticker.

On Jan. 31, hours before the launch of Solana-based Jupiter’s JUP airdrop, an Ethereum-based token with the same ticker spiked more than 430% before plummeting just hours later.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the price of Ethereum-based JUP went from $0.005 on Jan. 30 to $0.026 on Jan. 31 before plummeting back to its current price of $0.007.

The price of a different Jupiter protocol. Source: CoinMarketCap

Launched in 2017, the Ethereum-based Jupiter is a protocol designed for creating and hosting decentralized applications (DApps), however, its official website says the protocol is “no longer active.”

On the other hand, the Solana-based Jupiter is a decentralized exchange aggregator that allows users to swap, place limit orders and deploy dollar-cost average buying strategies for tokens on the Solana network.

The outsized upward price action on the Ethereum-based JUP arrived just hours before the Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter opened claims on its roughly $700 million airdrop to early users.

Solana clears millions of “non vote” transactions in hours

Jupiter’s airdrop — one of the largest ever to occur on Solana — went off without a hitch, according to a Solana Foundation executive.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, the Solana Foundation’s head of strategy, Austin Federa, said that the Solana network performed admirably, as it handled a total of 2.5 million non-vote transactions in the first two and a half hours of Jupiter claims going live.

Federa said that while Solana (SOL $95) gas fees did spike significantly at the peak of the claiming frenzy, he jokingly added that gas reached the “astronomical fee” of 0.01 SOL, roughly $1.02 at current prices.

Federa contrasted this with the outsized gas fees paid by users of the Ethereum network during popular airdrops such as the launch of ApeCoin in March 2022.

If you look at like the ApeCoin airdrop, which was probably the biggest hype Ethereum airdrop, people were paying $3,500 in gas fees to claim.

However, the airdrop event also saw numerous complaints from users of third-party apps such as Phantom Wallet and Solflare in the first hour of the airdrop. Federa said the issue was remote procedure call (RPC) nodes — the interface between user wallets and the network — and not the base layer of Solana itself.

“The base layer 1 held exactly as you would expect it to during a large influx of user activity, the RPC layer was fine — mostly unimpacted — and validators kept producing blocks in the network,” said Federa.

Meanwhile, a seventeen-year-old pseudonymous crypto investor who goes by the X handle notshort claims to have raked in over $1 million from the Solana-based JUP airdrop.

Of all eligible wallets, 41% have now claimed their JUP tokens, with a total of 566 million JUP — 57% of the total airdrop allocation — being claimed since the airdrop went live at 10:00 am Eastern Time on Jan. 31, according to Dune Analytics data from Osk2020.

More than 176,000 wallets claimed their airdrop within the first hour. Source: Dune Analytics