Written by: Lucy, BlockBeats
Editor: Jack, BlockBeats
This year, the market has been extremely lacking in new narratives. The short-lived bull market brought by ETFs has not really injected new vitality into the crypto market. Meme has become the most profitable field, while the corresponding VC coins have been criticized many times. DeFi projects in particular have hardly made any waves in several rounds of capital rotations and are still in dire straits.
In order to restore value, value coins are looking for their own breakthroughs. "Community consensus" is the unified answer they give, and community activity has become an indicator for them to judge the strength of consensus. Jupiter is one of "them".
Jupiter co-founder meow has been hiding in the crypto developer community. He has served as chief advisor to Instadapp, Kyber, and Blockfolio, co-founder of the largest wrapped token wBTC, and one of the founding contributors of the Handshake project. However, these titles have never allowed meow to disclose his identity. It was not until two days before the JUP airdrop that meow made a public appearance and accepted an exclusive interview with Capital Club founder Luke Belmar.
In the interview, meow repeatedly emphasized the importance of community consensus. He criticized the current abuse of the word "community" in the crypto world, believing that only a strong consensus can truly be called a "community", and it is consensus that shapes currency.
To this end, Jupiter has invested a lot of energy in building and maintaining the community. In addition, after the PPP experimental partner Irene Zhao went bankrupt, and the JLP contract platform withstood the plummeting market and became the "best bidder", Jupiter attracted enough attention to the community, but this attention did not seem to bring much value increment to JUP.
Most popular DEX community
At the Solana Breakpoint hackathon a year ago, meow’s speech was hailed as one of the most popular speeches. Meow felt that consensus had been accumulated amid the cheers, so he decided to take the first step to convert these users who love Jupiter into a community.
Jupiter hopes to build the most dynamic, forward-looking, and non-expert community in the crypto space. To this end, Jupiter has established a dedicated working group for media channels such as Twitter, DC, websites, YouTube, and Reddit, which is operated by team members and community members.
With careful operation and maintenance, Jupiter has created a prosperous and lively community. According to similarweb data, Twitter accounts for 66.25% of all Jupiter's social traffic. Overall, Jupiter's social traffic accounts for 3.49% of website traffic. Compared with Raydium, which is also known as the new leader of Solana, Jupiter is better at converting social media influence into traffic, and mainly relies on Twitter for communication. This also shows from the side that Jupiter has a closer interactive connection with the community.
The upper picture is Jupiter, and the lower picture is Raydium
"Thousand-person meetings" are a daily routine
Just like how fan clubs use different abbreviations to screen their own small groups, Jupiter is also using its own unique language to build a core circle.
meow has been creating different abbreviations, and in most cases, he does not explain these abbreviations in words. You can only understand the meaning of the abbreviations by watching Jupiter's Planetary Call. The audience seems to be happy to maintain a sense of pride that "only I know", chatting in the comment area with abbreviations. If the spectators want to fit in, they have to learn new vocabulary.
The Planetary Conference is live streamed on YouTube and Twitter at the same time every Wednesday. Kash, the leader of Meow and Uplink, will host each session, and other team members will share the latest developments of the project in detail, so that the community can have a deep understanding of the Jupiter ecosystem. Each YouTube session has almost 4,000 views, and Twitter has tens of thousands of views.
The left picture shows the Jupiter YouTube live broadcast column, and the right picture shows the Twitter live broadcast of the 20th Jupiter Planetary Conference
Looking at the entire crypto ecosystem, it seems that only Ethereum can complete this workload. Ethereum holds a core developer conference call every week, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation. As a live conference that has been held for hundreds of sessions, its average YouTube views are mostly less than 500. When searching on Twitter with keywords, the first tweet on the homepage is still displayed in 2022.
The left picture shows the Ethereum YouTube live broadcast column, and the right picture shows the Twitter search results with "ETH" and "ACD" as keywords
From the perspective of interaction, the comment area of Jupiter live broadcast is always full of interactive messages, even flooding the screen, but the interactive message area of Ethereum conference is mostly blank. Comments can be seen under each Jupiter video, while there are fewer comments under Ethereum conference, and there are even robot advertising comments.
The left picture shows the Jupiter Planet Conference, and the right picture shows the Ethereum Core Developer Conference
In terms of community proposals, DAO members can decide how Jupiter will allocate tokens to each working group. The Uplink working group budget has the least number of votes, about 178 million. But even with the current number of JUP staked, the voting rate four months ago was still over 50%. In addition, most proposals have a passing vote ratio of over 70%, and abstentions are maintained below 15%.
From left to right are the budget proposals of the Core Working Group, Website Working Group, Catdet (DC) Working Group, Reddit Working Group, and Uplink Working Group
In addition, in order to further "get closer to the people", Jupiter proposed a proposal to reduce the token supply in mid-June, and the team voluntarily cut 30% from the allocated tokens, and the token emission was reduced by 30% accordingly. The remaining reductions will come from previously allocated allocations, such as limited partnerships and strategic reserves. The proposal was carried out on August 1, and more than 160 million votes were collected in just half a day. In the end, 95% of people voted in favor and received 274 million votes, setting a record for DAO voting rate.
Perhaps Jupiter thought that voting on token distribution was not enough, and on July 31, it published a draft agreement, which included that the distribution of JUP to date would be publicly reviewed every 6 months; if any tokens were released, 100% disclosure of token sales would be made; if any tokens were released from the reserve for strategic reasons, the release would be carefully managed to be proportional to market liquidity, ensuring that it was communicated at least 3 months in advance.
All wallets will be clearly labeled so that JUP usage can be easily tracked. Notably, all community allocated tokens will be distributed via DAO voting for full visibility.
In addition, in order to solve the PVP chaos of meme coins, Jupiter promotes PPP. According to meow's explanation, the core focus of the PPP community cannot be to attract others and hope to abandon them, but to have more allies and jointly build a common long-term future.
In order to realize PPP, Jupiter first preached the concept of PPP and even held a planetary conference with PPP as the theme. In the one and a half hour live broadcast, meow and Kash talked with six meme players. The retail investors who participated in the meeting were not famous KOLs, and the meme they recommended was not Golden Dog, but it still attracted thousands of viewers and swiped PPP in the comment area.
Subsequently, meow published an article to explain the PPP concept and held a PPP experiment, calling on the community to leave their Solana addresses in the comments section. Despite information asymmetry, the PPP experiment attracted hundreds of thousands of participants within a month.
「Let's Fucking Go」
In the process of answering questions, Jupiter realized that it was not enough to let the community just be a bystander to be truly "active", and they should be involved and become part of the builders.
So Jupiter launched Launchpad and handed over the right to choose the launch project to the community. Jupiter DAO was born for this purpose. In February, Jupiter launched DAO. Participating in voting requires staking 50 JUP. As of now, the total number of staked JUP exceeds 350 million, and the unique addresses exceed 550,000.
After the first test proposal was passed, Jupiter immediately held the first LFG Launchpad vote, which attracted more than 200 million JUP votes. It is worth noting that in Jupiter DAO, the voting power held by the public is basically the same as that of whales. According to the data of LFG Phase 3 provided by Jupiter, the voting power data and the independent voting wallet data are quite consistent. The winning project obtained 59.4% of the voting power and 60.7% of the independent voting wallets support, respectively, and the data is close.
Jupiter not only allows the community to participate in voting, but also allows DAO members to participate in the entire process of Launchpad. Jupiter LFG Launchpad is divided into four steps, namely application, presentation, voting, and launch.
Applicants need to publish their project introductions on the Jupiter forum. Therefore, not only the Jupiter team, but the entire Jupiter community can serve as the reviewer of the project. The degree of interaction between the project and the community is considered "community sentiment", which becomes a major factor affecting Jupiter's decision-making on candidates. In order to become a candidate, participating projects will have to pay attention to the dynamics of the Jupiter community at all times and answer questions for members. This positive feedback has gradually won enough traffic and attention for the entire ecosystem.
Candidate projects will be given a dedicated channel in the Jupiter official DC group and have AMA meetings with Jupiter, which will increase the chances of community communication and review. After the live broadcast, these AMA clips will be edited and released again, and the number of views of each clip can reach thousands. The final winning project and Jupiter protocol token launch time.
From left to right, these are the AMA videos of the three LFG champion projects Zeus, Sanctum, and deBridge.
The referendum greatly mobilized the enthusiasm of community participation. A large number of users participated in Launchpad like investing in local dogs. Therefore, LFG was jokingly called the abbreviation of "Let's Fucking Go". According to similarweb data, during the period of Launchpad, the LFG official website page was visited more than 3.23 million times. During the same period, DAO carried out two rounds of LFG voting, and the page was visited more than 3.4 million times, which is basically consistent with the data.
As a platform that was officially launched in April and has been in operation for less than half a year, Jupiter Launchpad traffic is very outstanding compared with other Launchpad platforms. The four major on-chain Launchpad platforms that were popular at the end of last year with the "Golden Shovel" - Bounce Brand, BakerySwap, Analysoor, and TurtSat, but their total visits are only 355,000 times, which is about one-tenth of Jupiter.
If compared with off-chain platforms, the most active Binance Launchpad has launched 93 projects, with more than 5.5 million unique participants, and the number of launched projects and unique addresses are 10 times that of Jupiter. In the past three months, Binance has launched 6 projects in total, and its Launchpad website has received 6.26 million visits, while LFG has launched 3 projects, and its visits are even slightly more than half of Binance.
Misplaced consensus
The effort and results that Jupiter puts into community building can be said to be equal, and the team has proven that it has the willingness and ability to attract enough collaborators.
After the LFG rules were first announced, 20 project applications were submitted on the Jupiter forum to participate in the first LFG campaign, and new project applications continued to appear. Countless meme communities shouted PPP and regarded Jupiter as a "revolutionary." Whether it is from social media interaction to DAO voting, or from participating in LFG to preaching PPP, Jupiter has attracted countless active users to participate in almost every initiative, but does high popularity really mean strong consensus?
What are you voting for?
The first phase winning project, Zeus Network, was officially listed on Jupiter LFG Launchpad on April 4, with a total supply of 50 million ZEUS tokens, and the price ended at $0.776. OKX immediately launched ZEUS, and the trading volume exceeded $100 million within 20 minutes of opening. However, the good times did not last long. After only one week, ZEUS could not withstand the market selling pressure and fell all the way to $0.185, a 10-fold drop from the opening price.
The day after ZEUS plunged, the second round of LFG voting started. The market did not leave much time for retail investors to react. People rushed to the next one after one died, and once again put all their enthusiasm into the second round of voting.
The second-phase winning project Sanctum connected with the Jupiter team several times in the early stages of the campaign. Its related videos uploaded to Jupiter's official YouTube channel have been viewed thousands of times and have received a lot of support from KOLs. Not only did it attract more than 230 million votes in the vote, becoming the LFG proposal with the most votes, but Sanctum also received 64% of the votes in this proposal, while the first-place candidates in the first and third LFGs did not receive more than 60% of the votes.
From left to right are the results of the first, second, and third LFG proposals
However, Sanctum was caught in an airdrop crisis. On July 16, Sanctum officially opened the airdrop claim inquiry window. In the airdrop rules it formulated, the team selected 2,000 "sincere contributors" through active review and distributed 50 million tokens. These so-called "sincere contributors" refer to users who promote Sanctum on social media, which inevitably makes "points players" who deposited real money feel dissatisfied.
The project was chosen by the community, but ended up with a bad ending, which seems to indicate that consensus has not been reached. Jupiter’s original intention of launching Launchpad was to hope that the project could work with the Jupiter ecosystem and Solana. This is not only the direction of the project’s development, but also one of the decision-making factors for community members to choose to launch a project.
LFG project application format, source: Jupiter Forum
But for community members, participating in LFG voting is like participating in an investment. If the project performs poorly, it means the investment has failed, so when voting, they will be more inclined to projects that are unique and have good advantages.
A person familiar with the matter told BlockBeats that the projects that won LFG had good engagement, that is, a large number of users using their protocols. "Personally, I voted for projects that can maximize my interests." For him, projects that he had used before or wanted to use would be more likely to get his attention, "because launching through LFG is a good boost to the project itself (and valuation), and I will also get project airdrops."
In addition, compared with the projects in the same period, the winning projects Zeus and Sanctum both have strong financing backgrounds. Crypto Wei Tuo explained to BlockBeats that "the voting logic of retail investors is influenced by VC and CEX, and they believe that only grand narratives endorsed by VC have the hope of being listed on large exchanges."
Zeus announced in early April that it had raised $8 million at a valuation of $100 million from Mechanism Capital, OKX Ventures, Animoca Ventures, and The Spartan Group. Angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Stacks co-founder Muneeb Ali, and Mechanism Capital founder Andrew Kang also participated in this round of financing.
Also as a winner, on April 4, Sanctum announced the completion of its seed round extension financing, which was led by Dragonfly and participated by THE CMS, DeFiance Capital, GenblockCapital, Jump Crypto and Solana Ventures and other VCs. In addition, angel investors from LayerZero Labs, Drift Protocol and other projects also participated in this round of financing, and the total financing amount reached US$6.1 million.
As for their peers, the top-ranked NFT lending protocol Sharky.fi and NFT liquidity protocol Banx also have financing backgrounds, but the investors and financing amounts are far less than Zeus. Among them, Sharky.fi is only invested by Token Ventures, and the financing amount and financing date are unknown. Banx completed a $1 million seed round of financing in 2022, while DePIN infrastructure Uprock, clean energy network Srcful and MonkeyDEX have no relevant financing records.
Image source: rootdata
So if all candidate projects are not backed by VCs, what will be the selection criteria for retail investors? Crypto Wei Tuo cited the investment logic of meme coins to explain this problem. Meme coins themselves are unbacked cryptocurrencies, and their trading volume is much larger than that of VC coins. However, when they are put together with VC coins for voting in Launchpad, people cannot make a judgment.
"This is the paradox of the Launchpad model," Crypto Wei Tuo believes that not only Jupiter, but also Launchpad platforms including DaoMaker and Seedify are essentially no different, that is, they all cancel on-chain indicators without reducing risk exposure.
In addition, because Jupiter focuses on fairness and deliberately downplays the vote-buying factor in voting, all users who stake JUP (at least 50) can participate in the voting. One wallet can only choose one project, and 1 JUP represents one vote. In this regard, Feng Wuxiang said, "This makes voting a formality."
There's trust
Jupiter launched a new meme Launch - CAT Launch Mechanisms at the end of July and announced the first Launch project ASIANMOM.
When ZachXBT pointed out that its partner Irene Zhao had been involved in fraudulent projects many times, Jupiter undoubtedly became the center of public opinion, and the topic surrounding Irene and Jupiter only became more and more popular. ALL IN CLUB held a space in time, which attracted more than 1,300 online listeners at one time, and even Irene appeared to share her experience, but the consensus of the community did not seem to be strengthened by the popularity.
Not only the Chinese community criticized Irene, the English community was also eager to ask Jupiter for an explanation.
That night, Jupiter responded to the 22nd Planetary Conference with the word "trust". Meow said, "When you don't have trust, PVP happens, but when you have trust, PPP happens." Irene also explained to BlockBeats that the meme Launch mechanism is complex and requires long-term commitments, such as long-term lock-ups, so it takes a lot of time and energy to interact with the community. It can be seen that Jupiter currently still regards "faith" as the main means of promoting PPP.
If the community’s trust in PPP came from Jupiter’s leading position in Solana, then the trust in ASIANMOM can only be guaranteed by transparency. Just as Jupiter responded to the community and ZachXBT’s questions, Irene also said many times in the space that “all token supply distribution will be very open and transparent.”
Jupiter's transparency is obvious to all, but the funds of the projects Irene has participated in for three years are all unknown, and this experience does not seem to have anything to do with the word "transparency". Although Irene said that she will have an 18-month token lock-up period in the AIANMOM project, and it is completely transparent and traceable, the seeds of doubt have been planted, and it is difficult for the community to pretend not to care.
In fact, Jupiter has never concealed its desire to send memes to Launchpad. As long as the meme is good enough, it can still apply to launch LFG. However, all the projects that submitted LFG applications are old concepts such as GameFi, NFT, Defi, and infrastructure. So Jupiter personally launched meme Launch to promote the PPP experiment. Irene also said in the space that the cooperation with Jupiter has been determined long ago, and the previously released PPP experiment content is the result of the joint discussion between the two parties.
LFG Launchpad Notes, Image source: Jupiter Forum
The day after the ASIANMOM explosion, meow connected with Iggy, the founder of MOTHER, for a live broadcast of more than 2 hours. In this conversation, meow emphasized the importance of building trust and recognition in the Web 2 world. Perhaps what Jupiter values is Irene's common experience in both Web2 and Web3.
Before entering the Web3 industry, Irene had been an Instagram influencer for a long time. After crossing over to Konomi, she shaped her own brand image as CMO and accumulated enough Web3 popularity and fans in half a year. Irene explained to BlockBeats, "The Telegram emoticon package based on IreneDAO had more than 1,000 downloads in 3 days. And all of them came from Web3 Telegram native users, and many industry bigwigs were paying attention."
The left picture shows the YouTube live broadcast of meow and Iggy, and the right picture shows the IreneDAO emoticon package on Telegram
Irene emphasized in the space that the main reason for this collaboration is that meow likes the Asian mom narrative. After seeing MOTHER, meow, as a Chinese, hopes that Asia can also have its own "mom". In meow's eyes, the "mom" narrative is not just a meme, but also symbolizes a cultural unit that continues to spread.
meow also talked about how the meme with the "mom" narrative in popular culture increases the appeal and memorability of the meme in terms of visual performance, and believes that the narrative symbolizes the perfect storm of emotional connection, polarization, and cultural understanding, making it an efficient and lasting meme. Therefore, Irene, who has a community base of Asian moms, naturally became Jupiter's target of cooperation.
Whatever the reason, this collaboration was like a surprise attack on the community. Due to the lack of a strong consensus, the trust and faith accumulated by the community seemed to have collapsed the moment ZachXBT released the evidence.
Although Irene told BlockBeats that in order to make ASIANMOM successful, she and Jupiter's Launchpad, Uplink and airdrop teams have been discussing how to implement Launch, and most teams have participated in designing the Launch mechanism, Irene's previous experience inevitably made community members doubt her strength and ability to bring orders.
In addition, Jupiter has not made any substantial progress except for promoting "trust". Therefore, when asked whether he is optimistic about the prospects of PPP, Feng Wuxiang said, "Meme is PVP, meow is not a savior, and can't change anything."
Best alternatives
"Like JUP, avoid Launch", this may be the highest praise the community has given to Jupiter after Launch's frequent failures. It also indirectly shows that although the high community popularity has not brought strong consensus to Jupiter, it does not mean that seizing the attention economy is a wrong decision.
DeFi as a whole has performed poorly in this cycle. According to Dune data, the daily trading volume of DEX reached 4.26 billion US dollars, of which Uniswap accounted for half of the total. However, according to DeFiLlama data, Uniswap's trading volume has been in a long-term stagnation since this year, with no obvious signs of growth. Therefore, DEX has to pay attention to the attention market, and LFG Launchpad and meme Launch are indispensable steps. The open and transparent LFG Launchpad can attract the native traffic of Web3, and the meme Launch in cooperation with Irene can seize the market potential of Web2.
The left picture shows the market share of DEX trading volume, and the right picture shows the changes in Uniswap’s TVL and trading volume in 2024
The stagnation of DeFi development will be reflected in the altcoin market. According to Binance research, the MC/FDV of altcoins in 2024 will be only 12.3%, the lowest in the past three years. Therefore, when asked about the poor performance of Launchpad, Feng Wuxiang explained to BlockBeats that "in addition to the worrying project itself, this may also be related to the altcoin market."
Feng Wuxiang believes that "in the last bull market, new narratives such as the Metaverse, NFT, and GameFi emerged. Most copycat projects can rise as long as their concepts match the hot spots, and in this cycle, 99% of the copycat projects reached their peak as soon as they opened. Except for the meme on Solana, there are no real projects that have succeeded."
It is precisely because the meme craze is becoming more and more frequent that TGBot, which can provide functions such as copy trading, data analysis, and cross-chain assets, has further suppressed the DEX market. According to Dune data, Banana Gun's trading volume achieved a trading volume of US$5 billion during the meme craze, and the current trading volume has exceeded US$5.6 billion, with an average daily trading volume of more than US$23 million.
In just one year, Banana Gun Protocol surpassed MetaMask, Curve Finance, and Raydium in terms of revenue. Its ability to attract millions of dollars even attracted the attention of Binance, which launched BANANA as the first HODLer Airdrops project on its seventh anniversary.
Comparing only the DEX track, Solana DEX seems to have improved slightly. According to Defillama data, the DEX transaction volume on Solana reached US$55.876 billion in July, while the Ethereum DEX transaction volume was US$53.867 billion during the same period, which also means that the monthly DEX transaction volume on Solana has surpassed Ethereum for the first time in history.
However, as the leader of Solana, Jupiter has been sucked blood by Raydium for a long time. Dune data shows that most of Solana's DeFi players are distributed in Raydium. Although pump.fun has been seizing Solana's user market since its birth, Raydium is less affected than Meteora, another project of the Jupiter team.
The left picture shows the ranking of public chains by DEX transaction volume, and the right picture shows the total number of users of different DeFi protocols on Solana
Moreover, according to Messari’s second quarter ecosystem report on Solana, Raydium became the main beneficiary of pump.fun, increasing its daily average trading volume by 77% month-on-month to $867 million and its TVL to $991 million, making it the project with the highest TVL in the Solana DeFi protocol. In contrast, although Jupiter is still the main source of transactions for Solana, accounting for 51% of DEX transactions, its market share was surpassed by Raydium at the end of the quarter.
With TGBot taking over in the past and DEX competing in the future, Jupiter is willing to try to attract long-term players and funds at the cost of losing money, and going beyond the circle is also a methodology.
From the legendary story of pizza and Bitcoin to the advent of Ethereum and then to Musk promoting Dogecoin, each cycle has a unique narrative of breaking out of the circle. This round of bull market for Bitcoin brought by ETFs outside the circle, and meme bull market led by Solon inside the circle. The celebrity participation in memes may be the opportunity for Jupiter to break out of the circle.
In the communication with Iggy, meow firmly expressed his hope to become the first real Alpha. In his opinion, only by becoming the first celebrity to prove the celebrity project and achieve long-term success can one be a real Alpha. Introducing celebrities, creating a publishing platform, and brand cooperation are very important for increasing visibility and generating revenue. Jupiter hopes to create a roadmap to guide and increase awareness of specific tokens through cooperation and merchandise.
This is essentially a competition for the attention market. But Irene does not think that now is a good time for Web2 stars to enter the market. She explained to BlockBeats, "Currently, Web3 is mainly on-chain players, and they are not willing to pay for Web2 stars."
In addition, for Web2 celebrity-led projects to be successful, they must have a certain degree of popularity in Web3. “It’s not like just anyone can become popular by posting a selfie NFT,” Irene added. “At the time, they wanted to copy IreneDAO but failed because they didn’t understand how to play with memes and Web3.”
When asked whether PPP will be promoted in the Web2 community, Irene said, "The Web2 community doesn't even know about PVP yet, so it's a bit too early to talk about PPP." In addition, "most Web2 stars are only driven by the money-making effect and are not really interested in this industry."
But Jupiter's idea of specializing in the attention economy will not change because of this. It will still greedily seek every opportunity and grab every potential "believer." As meow said, "Most of the best entrepreneurs, politicians, and influential people are hype masters because you need enough attention to take action."
