A seven-year-old, inactive Ethereum-based protocol experienced a sudden and brief surge in its token value, likely due to confusion with a major airdrop event from a Solana-based exchange aggregator sharing the same ticker.
On January 31, just hours before the launch of the Solana-based Jupiter’s JUP airdrop, an Ethereum-based token, also named JUP, witnessed a dramatic price increase. The Ethereum JUP’s value soared over 430%, climbing from $0.005 to $0.026, before rapidly declining back to around $0.007. This Ethereum-based Jupiter, established in 2017, was designed for decentralized application (DApp) creation and hosting but is currently inactive.
In contrast, the Solana-based Jupiter is an active decentralized exchange aggregator, facilitating token swaps and other trading strategies on the Solana network. Its recent airdrop, valued at approximately $700 million, is one of the largest in Solana’s history. The airdrop proceeded smoothly, according to Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation.
Federa reported that the Solana network handled 2.5 million non-vote transactions efficiently in the first few hours of the Jupiter airdrop. Despite a significant spike in gas fees at the peak of the claiming frenzy, the fees remained relatively low, peaking at about 0.01 SOL (approximately $1.02). This contrasts sharply with the high gas fees often seen on the Ethereum network during popular airdrops, such as the ApeCoin launch in March 2022, where fees reached up to $3,500.
The airdrop event wasn’t without issues, as users of third-party apps like Phantom Wallet and Solflare encountered problems in the initial hour. Federa clarified that these issues were related to RPC nodes – the interface between user wallets and the Solana network – and not due to any fundamental problems with Solana’s base layer.
Federa emphasized that the Solana network’s core infrastructure performed as expected under the high demand, with the RPC layer remaining mostly unaffected and validators continuously producing blocks.
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