JUP Token Soars After Massive $700M Jupiter Airdrop to Solana Wallets
One of the biggest token airdrops ever on the Solana (SOL) blockchain appeared to execute largely without major issues Wednesday with the chain staying upright as Jupiter started distributing roughly $700 million worth of its JUP token to nearly a million wallets.
The token itself began climbing in price immediately after its debut at 10 a.m. ET (15:00 UTC). Early bids came in around $0.41 and by press time they'd climbed to $0.72, giving JUP a fully diluted market cap north of $6 billion.
token's value was the performance of the blockchain it trades on: Solana. The network held up to the barrage of activity around JUP, observers told CoinDesk, processing the masses who attempted to claim it and also quickly trade it on decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, without much incident.
"Surprisingly, nothing notable" went wrong during the early moments of the airdrop, said 7Layer, the pseudonymous operator of the Overclock validator, part of the network of computers that process transactions for the Solana blockchain. "The server has looked pretty close to normal."
However, the launch was not entirely without hiccups. Some RPC nodes – the go-betweens for wallets and the network – struggled to keep up with user demands, especially in the first 30 minutes of the airdrop, according to validators discussing the airdrop in Solana's Discord server.
"The average end user had a lot of trouble in the first 30-45 minutes doing anything at all," one validator wrote on the server. "Glad the consensus layer held up great but let’s be real – the user experience wasn’t great."
