Around 17% of WEN Token Supply Could be Burned After Airdrop, Data Suggests

After months of asking Jupiter's team when the trading protocol's token airdrop would be, barely half of eligible wallets have claimed the valuable joke token WEN that resulted.

Two days are left in the claims window for WEN token, the latest meme coin on Solana that's doing double duty as a test-run for Jupiter's own highly anticipated airdrop. The token's price continues to swing wildly as eligible wallets nab up their allocations.

According to data reviewed by CoinDesk just under half of the wallets who made WEN's whitelist had claimed their tokens by press time. Each eligible wallet gets the same amount of WEN: 643,652 tokens worth around $70, but the price of the brand new meme coin is highly volatile.

At current prices that means airdrop hunters are leaving $39 million in value on the table, assuming of course that the WEN claims stop right now. That's unlikely to happen. But a good chunk of WEN will likely go unclaimed at the end of the three-day airdrop. On-chain data suggests this figure could be at least 17% of WEN's 1 trillion token supply.

Final claim figures could influence WEN's price by restricting the meme coin's total supply. WEN's creators minted 1 trillion WEN tokens and earmarked 700 billion of it for this three-day airdrop. They've pledged to burn any airdrop-earmarked tokens that aren't claimed by early on Jan. 29.

The WEN airdrop is the latest spread-the-wealth event on the Solana blockchain. Over 1 million wallets became eligible for it by holding a variety of NFTs, owning the Solana-themed Saga smartphone or trading small amounts of crypto on the Jupiter DEX aggregator.

Jupiter's own airdrop of the JUP token is slated for next week, making the WEN release a proving ground for a whole slate of airdrop tech. It debuted on Jupiter's new "LFG Launchpad," an airdrop claims portal with a suite of services to support markets for trading new tokens.

Around 175 billion WEN tokens could be burned if the current rate of airdrop claims holds. But the figure is likely to be far larger, especially if the claims rate continues to slow.

CoinDesk estimated these figures using transaction data from the on-chain program in charge of the WEN airdrop. At press time it had processed around 7,000 successful claims in the previous hour. That rate is gradually slowing and will likely continue to tail off as the airdrop continues.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the busiest time for WEN claims was right at the start of the airdrop. Airdrop hunters blasted the distribution program with 225,000 claims transactions in the first hour alone and then caused massive spikes and swoons in its market on the Jupiter-built liquidity pool protocol Meteora.

Jupiter's team was expecting the action. WEN trading largely happened in a pool on Meteora, a piece of market-making infrastructure for swapping tokens on the Solana blockchain. The pool had been allocated 200 billion WEN tokens to support liquidity. Jupiter co-founder Ben Chow said the early hours of trading were "overall pretty seamless" because they tested things out beforehand.

What is WEN token?
WEN token is a joke about airdrop hunters and a debut for a new kind of token on Solana. First, the joke: WEN. That was the unending cry of many an airdrop trader. These "wen bros" (as one Jupiter co-founder calls them) pelted Jupiter with questions about its airdrop timing for months, causing the founder, who goes by the pseudonym Weremeow, to write a poem. A screenshot of that poem was turned into a fractionalized NFT by Ovols, a project with its own tokenization standard for the Solana blockchain. Ovols created the 1 trillion WEN tokens as fractionalized shares of the WEN poem and then worked with Jupiter to launch the token.