A dormant Ethereum-based protocol, Jupiter, experienced a sudden surge in its token price due to a striking coincidence involving Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter’s $700 million airdrop.
Just hours before the launch of Solana-based Jupiter’s JUP airdrop on January 31st, the Ethereum-based JUP token with the same ticker saw its price skyrocket by more than 430%, only to plunge back down shortly after.
According to CoinMarketCap data, Ethereum-based JUP surged from $0.005 on January 30th to $0.026 on January 31st, eventually settling at its current price of $0.007.
The Ethereum-based Jupiter protocol, launched in 2017, was designed for creating and hosting decentralized applications (DApps).
However, it is now labeled as “no longer active” on its official website. In contrast, Solana-based Jupiter operates as a decentralized exchange aggregator, enabling users to swap, place limit orders, and deploy dollar-cost average buying strategies for tokens within the Solana network.
The unexpected price surge of Ethereum-based JUP occurred just hours before the Solana-based Jupiter initiated its massive $700 million airdrop to early users, which turned out to be one of the largest airdrops ever on the Solana network, successfully executed without any issues, according to a Solana Foundation executive.
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Austin Federa, the head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, praised the Solana network’s performance during the airdrop.
He highlighted that the network handled a total of 2.5 million non-vote transactions within the first two and a half hours of Jupiter claims going live. F
edera also noted that while Solana gas fees briefly spiked during the claiming frenzy, they remained much lower than Ethereum’s exorbitant fees, with a humorous mention of a fee reaching “astronomical” levels at approximately $1.02.
Despite the successful airdrop, some users of third-party apps like Phantom Wallet and Solflare experienced issues during the first hour of the event, attributed to remote procedure call (RPC) nodes rather than Solana’s core network infrastructure.
The base layer of Solana performed well throughout the high user activity period.
Additionally, a pseudonymous seventeen-year-old crypto investor, known as X handle notshort, claimed to have earned over $1 million from the Solana-based JUP airdrop.
Data from Dune Analytics indicated that 41% of eligible wallets had claimed their JUP tokens, with a total of 566 million JUP, constituting 57% of the entire airdrop allocation, being claimed since the airdrop’s launch on January 31st at 10:00 am Eastern Time.
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