Solana’s decentralized exchange, Jupiter (JUP), experienced a significant increase in trading volume within the past 24 hours. The volume reached over $480 million, driven by the growing interest in a new “memecoin” called Wen. This surge in volume allowed Jupiter to surpass Ethereum’s top decentralized exchange, Uniswap, for the first time. In fact, Jupiter’s trading volume exceeded the combined volume of Uniswap V2 and V3 by $10 million. Both protocols recorded 24-hour volumes of $480 million, according to CoinGecko.
The majority of Jupiter’s trading volume came from the buying and selling of Wen. This memecoin was airdropped to Jupiter users and owners of Solana’s Saga phone. Jupiter’s developers strategically launched Wen ahead of the highly anticipated airdrop of the exchange’s native JUP token on January 31st. Wen capitalized on the current frenzy around crypto token drops, serving as a clever marketing tactic.
While Wen generated significant trading volume, stablecoin trading accounted for the majority of Jupiter’s volumes. Over $191 million worth of trades occurred between Solana and major stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT.
Looking ahead, the focus now shifts to the release of Jupiter’s 1 billion JUP utility tokens on January 31st. The pre-market JUP tokens are currently trading around $0.61 on the decentralized exchange Aevo, resulting in an airdrop value of over $600 million at current prices. The current price of the JUP token, according to CoinMarketCap, is $0.005513. The value of Jupiter has increased by 10% in the past day, with a current market cap of $5.49 million.
Jupiter’s airdrop activities coincide with other highly anticipated token giveaways in the wider crypto ecosystem. AltLayer, an Ethereum scaling platform, recently announced a $100 million token airdrop. Additionally, rival project Dymension plans to give away 70 million tokens to eligible users upon the launch of its mainnet, with an estimated value of $210 million.