After a suspenseful wait of more than two months, Jupiter is gearing up for its highly anticipated token airdrop scheduled for January 31. As the leading decentralized exchange aggregator, not only on Solana but across the entire DeFi landscape, expectations for Jupiter’s airdrop are soaring.
Jupiter developer Ming Ng added an extra layer of excitement last week with the launch of WEN—a memecoin created using Solana’s novel token extensions and initiated through Jupiter’s LFG launchpad. WEN was airdropped to over a million wallets, including active Jupiter users, top NFT collection holders, and Genesis Saga phone holders. The one trillion WEN tokens swiftly amassed a total value surpassing $100 million.
While on the surface, the creation and airdrop of WEN may seem like a tactic to build anticipation for Jupiter’s upcoming token launch, it serves as a proof of concept for the WEN New Standard (WNS). WNS is a new, lightweight token standard for NFTs on Solana developed by LFG, with WEN acting as a fractionalized WNS NFT into one trillion fungible tokens.
The launch of WEN also served as a stress test for Jupiter’s infrastructure, its bot mitigation measures, and the entire Solana network. WNS is the initial Solana NFT standard utilizing the 13 new token extensions deployed on the blockchain last week, hinting at more innovations in the NFT space on Solana.
In a separate development, Euler Labs CEO Michael Bentley reported recovering the $3.8 million worth of governance tokens he claimed to have lost at the beginning of the month. Despite the setback, Euler Labs continued its operations, announcing a new DeFi primitive called the Ethereum Vault Connector in January, contributing to a rally in EUL tokens.
In a significant move, Ethereum layer 2 Celo has become the latest blockchain to host a native USDC deployment by Circle. This marks the 16th blockchain where Circle has launched USDC natively, enhancing interoperability in the DeFi space and bolstering security by avoiding reliance on bridged versions of USDC.
As Jupiter’s token launch approaches, Solana activity is witnessing a surge, with notable spikes in active wallets, new token deployments, transaction count, and network fees over the past week. While new token deployments have surpassed their December peak, active wallets have yet to reach the same levels.
