How Did Jupiter's JUP Drop Go?

Solana’s leading aggregator, Jupiter, airdropped the long-awaited JUP token to its early users this morning! How is the market reacting?

Jupiter’s airdrop is putting 1B JUP in the hands of early users. It marks the first of four annual distribution events, each of which will occur on January 31st and will distribute a total of 4B JUP to the community.

JUP opened at $0.40 on Solana, a price set by the Jupiter team who provided 500M in single-sided JUP liquidity starting at this range on Meteora, a full $0.25 below the price of pre-market futures provided by Aevo. Bots quickly arbed the discrepancy between these prices, and the price settled in the $0.70 range within an hour of the pool's launch.

With airdrop allocations ranging in size from 1k to 100k JUP tokens, individual claimants are walking away with anywhere from $700 to $70k in free money per eligible wallet from the Jupiter airdrop 🪂

At a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $7.2B, Jupiter has surpassed the valuation of go-to Ethereum exchange Uniswap, valued at $6.1B!

While Solana-native liquid staking protocol Jito managed to briefly surpass its Ethereum counterpart Lido in terms of FDV after its token launched, that flippening has since reversed, begging the question: can JUP sustain its momentum?

Jupiter’s product line spans from DEX aggregation to advanced order types to perpetual futures to token launchpads, presenting a much more diversified revenue generation story than Uniswap.

Further, Solana’s low-fee environment encourages high swap volumes, a feature that has allowed its DEX volumes to flip those on Ethereum with frequency. As the leading swap platform on Solana, Jupiter directly benefits from these inflated volumes.

With strong fundamentals at Jupiter’s core, JUP appears to be a smart play to capitalize on increased speculative activity in the Solana ecosystem, and the Protocol is well positioned to hold its lead against Uniswap should it continue to enjoy high swap volumes.