JUP token is up over 180% after a massive $700 million airdrop

One of the largest token airdrops ever on the Solana (SOL) blockchain appeared to have gone off largely without major problems on Wednesday with the chain still standing as Jupiter began distributing JUP tokens worth about $700 million for nearly a million wallets.
The JUP token itself began to increase in price immediately after its launch at 10:00 pm Vietnam time last night. The initial bid was around $0.30 when trading began on Binance and rose to a high of around $0.87, marking an increase of more than 180%, before falling to $0.66 at press time. , giving JUP a fully diluted market cap of $6.4 billion.

Source: Binance

Perhaps more important than the token's value is the performance of the blockchain it trades on: Solana. Observers see that the network has withstood the increased flurry of activity around JUP, dealing with large numbers of people trying to claim the airdrop and also quickly trading it on decentralized exchanges or DEXs without encountered many problems.
7Layer, the anonymous operator of the Overclock validator, part of the computer network that processes transactions for the Solana blockchain, said: “Surprisingly, there were no notable incidents during the initial moments of the airdrop. The server seems to be working normally."

However, the launch was not completely without hiccups. Some RPC nodes – intermediaries for the wallet and network – struggled to keep up with user demand, especially in the first 30 minutes of the airdrop, according to validators discussing the airdrop on the Discord channel by Solana.
One authenticator wrote:
“The average end user has a lot of trouble in the first 30-45 minutes of doing anything. Glad the consensus layer worked well but let's be honest – the user experience is not that good.”
As of press time, nearly 60% of the JUP 1 billion set aside for Wednesday's airdrop has been claimed, according to the Flipside dashboard created by Marqu. Jupiter has set aside a large portion of its tokens to be distributed to traders through its routing service, which handles the majority of onchain swap transactions on Solana.


Source: Flipside

Because of its scale, Jupiter developers fear the airdrop will devastate their system as well as Solana's. One of the anonymous founders known as Weremeow declared “Jupuary” (January) as a month to test the system to ensure the worst will not happen.
Jupiter oversaw two other airdrops this month, mockJUP and WEN, which tested its designs for onchain liquidity pools as well as the new “Launchpad” infrastructure Jupiter created to launch tokens, called is LFG.
That has become a free coin hunt for most airdrop hunters. Even small traders received tens, even hundreds of dollars worth of tokens from Jupiter in January. The minimum airdrop claim on Wednesday was 200 JUP worth about $140 at press time .
Trading volume on decentralized exchange aggregator Solana has skyrocketed to new heights during the JUP token airdrop.
According to data from both CoinGecko and Jupiter, the platform achieved a daily trading volume worth more than $1.2 billion in the past 24 hours. That puts it at the top among all crypto DEXs, beating typical leader Uniswap V3 on Ethereum by $854 million (according to CoinGecko). Note that the tally does not include Uniswap volume on other chains.

Source: CoinGecko

Jupiter's 24-hour tally also appears to record an all-time record for the platform as it sees demand surge. Another data source, DeFi Llama, shows Pupiter's single-day volume record reaching over $1 billion on December 14, 2023.