Crypto Market Turmoil: Traders Manipulate ‘JUP’ Token After $700 Million Jupiter Airdrop

After releasing the ‘JUP’ token worth $700 million yesterday, January 31, many traders made huge profits. However, due to the rate of selling pressure, the token entered a bearish trend, causing others to lose. 

According to the report, some traders bet on the wrong Jupiter token’s price before releasing the primary token. 

Traders Pumped Wrong JUP While Other Profits from Real Solana JUP Airdrop

On January 31, hours before the Solana-based Jupiter’s JUP airdrop launch, an Ethereum token with the same ticker was introduced. The confusion occurred because they both had a similar ticker symbol. This fake Ethereum-based Jupiter spiked over 350% within a few hours of launch.

Unfortunately, it plummeted just hours later. Data from CoinMarketCap shows the Ethereum-based JUP went from $0.005 on January 30 to $0.026 on January 31. It then fell back to its current $0.007 price after the pump.

The Ethereum Jupiter was launched in 2017 and used for decentralized apps.

But its website says it is “no longer active.” So, it was surprising to see price action. Meanwhile, the Solana Jupiter is a DEX aggregator for swapping and limiting orders of Solana tokens. This was the actual project doing the airdrop.

Unfortunately, the 350% Ethereum JUP price pump came just hours before the $700 million airdrop for Solana’s Jupiter opened claims.

This shows traders likely bought the wrong token. This was further proven when a 17-year-old trader said he made $1 million from the real Jupiter token airdrops and shared his profit data publicly online.

A 17-year-old @notxavierj earned over $1 million from the Jupiter airdrop as part of a careful strategy requiring time and capital investment.

His success highlights both opportunities in crypto for outsized gains but also the need for a nuanced understanding of DeFi.

— Benzinga (@Benzinga) January 31, 2024

Solana Processed Millions of Transactions Quickly

On January 31, Jupiter Exchange shared its progress on the X platform. According to the exchange, it can now handle a whopping 80% organic trading volume. 

Also, it holds the title of the most used program in the Solana ecosystem.

Further, the platform stated it has become “One of the top prep platforms recording $1.4B volume last week,” In another post, Solana Foundation executive Austin also revealed that Jupiter’s massive airdrop went smoothly on Solana without any significant technical issues.

In the first 2.5 hours, Solana handled 2.5 million non-vote transactions for the airdrop claims. This influx of activity did not disrupt the network.

According to the Flipside dashboard, over 20% of the 1 billion JUP reserved was claimed immediately after launching the token. Still, nothing happened to the network.

An X user, Zaheer, posted that the airdrop “was a huge stress test on the network.” “Yet Solana, like all chains, still has a lot of work to do to improve things,” the X user added. This user made this tweet highlighting Austin Federa’s (Solana Foundation’s head) post.

Well, that was boring pic.twitter.com/erKTtWZa79

— Austin Federa | 🇺🇸 (@Austin_Federa) January 31, 2024

Notably, in the post, the head of Solana Foundation, Austin, shared a chart and mentioned that it represents 102,229 claims, implying the network is resilient despite the pressure. 

In response to the post, Zaheer pointed out that the Solana network still has room for improvement, meaning it could do better.