About 17% of the WEN memecoin supply could be burned after the airdrop ends
After months of waiting and constant questioning about Jupiter's JUP token airdrop, over 1 million wallets have qualified to claim the newly launched memecoin WEN.
While the two days of claiming the WEN airdrop have passed, the newest memecoin on Solana is doing double duty as a test run for Jupiter's highly anticipated airdrop. The price of WEN continues to fluctuate wildly as eligible wallets win their allocation.
Less than half of eligible wallets had claimed their WEN at press time. Each qualified wallet will receive the same amount of 643,652 WEN worth around 70 USD, but the price of the brand new memecoin is highly volatile.
WEN memecoin price chart. Source: TradingView
At current prices, that means airdrop hunters are missing out on $39 million, assuming of course that WEN claiming activity stops now. That's unlikely to happen. But a large amount of WEN may not be claimed by the end of the three-day airdrop. Onchain data suggests this could represent at least 17% of the total 1 trillion WEN supply.
The claim metric could ultimately impact the price of WEN by limiting the total supply of memecoin. The creators of WEN have minted 1 trillion tokens and reserved 700 billion of them for this three-day airdrop. They have committed to burning any unclaimed airdrop tokens by January 29.
Airdrop WEN is the latest free coin sharing event on the Solana blockchain. More than 1 million wallets have qualified by holding a variety of NFTs, owning Solana's Saga smartphone, or trading small amounts of cryptocurrency on DEX aggregator Jupiter.
Jupiter's own JUP token airdrop is expected to take place next week, with WEN as a demo for the entire airdrop technology. It launches on Jupiter's new “LFG Launchpad”, an airdrop claim portal with a suite of services supporting the new token exchange market.
Approximately 175 billion WEN tokens could be burned if the current airdrop claim rate is maintained. But this number could be much larger, especially if claim rates continue to slow.
According to transaction data from the onchain program in charge of the WEN airdrop, at the time of writing, there were about 1,540 successful claims processed in the previous hour. That pace is gradually slowing down and will likely continue to decline.
WEN's distribution program activities. Source: Solscan
Perhaps not surprisingly, the busiest time for WEN claiming activity is right at the start of the airdrop. Airdrop hunters blew up the distribution program with 225,000 claims in just the first hour and then caused massive spikes on the Meteora liquidity pool protocol built by Jupiter.
Jupiter's group had expected this. WEN trading largely takes place in a pool on Meteora, a piece of infrastructure that creates a market for token swaps on the Solana blockchain. The group has been allocated 200 billion WEN for liquidity support. Jupiter co-founder Ben Chow said the early hours of trading were “generally pretty seamless” because they had tested everything beforehand.
What is WEN?
WEN is a joke about airdrop hunters and the launch of a new token on Solana.
First, the joke: WEN. That is the endless cry of many airdrop traders. These “wen bros” (as one Jupiter co-founder calls them) have been peppering Jupiter with questions about the timing of its airdrop for months, prompting the anonymous founder Weremeow to write a poem.
A screenshot of that poem was turned into a fractional NFT by Ovols – a project with its own token standard for the Solana blockchain. Ovols created 1k WEN as fractions of the WEN poem and then worked with Jupiter to launch the token.
