A seven-year-old defunct Ethereum-based protocol may have briefly benefitted from the $700 million airdrop for Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter, due to a similar price ticker.

On Jan. 31, hours before the launch of Solana-based Jupiter’s airdrop of “JUP,” an Ethereum-based token with the same ticker spiked more than 430% on Jan. 31, before plummeting just hours later.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the price of Ethereum-based JUP went from $0.005 on Jan. 30 to $0.026 on Jan. 31 before plummeting back to its current price of $0.007.

Traders pumped and dumped another ‘JUP’ during $700M Jupiter airdrop image 0 The price of a different Jupiter protocol. Source: CoinMarketCap.

Launched in 2017, the Ethereum-based Jupiter is a protocol designed for creating and hosting decentralized applications (DApps), however, its official website says the protocol is “no longer active.”

On the other hand, the Solana-based Jupiter is a decentralized exchange aggregator that allows users to swap, place limit orders, and deploy dollar-cost average buying strategies for tokens on the Solana network.

The outsized upward price action on the Ethereum-based JUP arrived just hours before the Solana-based exchange aggregator Jupiter opened claims on its roughly $700 million airdrop to early users.

Solana clears millions of 'non vote' transactions in hours

Jupiter’s airdrop, one of the largest ever to have occurred on Solana, went off without a hitch, according to a Solana Foundation executive.

State Of Jupiter: Jupuary 2024

1. Most used trading platform in defi
2. Direct 80% of organic volume
3. Most used program in Solana
4. Top 2 by vol on Coingecko
5. Most integrated platform on Solana
6. One of the top perp platforms ($1.4B volume last week)

Deets:… pic.twitter.com/UEnwgyc2eu

— Jupiter (@JupiterExchange) January 30, 2024

Speaking to Cointelegraph, the Solana Foundation’s head of strategy, Austin Federa said that the Solana network performed “admirably,” as it handled a total of 2.5 million non-vote transactions in the first 2 and a half hours of the Jupiter claims going live.

Federa said that while Solana ( SOL ) gas fees did spike significantly at the peak of the claiming frenzy, he jokingly added that gas reached the “astronomical fee” of 0.01 SOL, roughly $1.02 at current prices.

Federa contrasted this with the outsized gas fees paid by users of the Ethereum network during popular airdrops such as the launch of ApeCoin in March 2022 .

“If you look at like the ApeCoin airdrop, which was probably the biggest hype Ethereum airdrop, people were paying $3,500 in gas fees to claim."

However, the airdrop event also saw  numerous complaints from users of third-party apps such as Phantom Wallet and Solflare in the first hour of the airdrop. Federa said the issue was RPC nodes — the interface between user wallets and the network — and not the base layer of Solana itself.

“The base layer one held exactly as you would expect it to during a large influx of user activity, the RPC layer was fine — mostly unimpacted — and validators kept producing blocks in the network,” said Federa.

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Meanwhile, a seventeen-year-old pseudonymous crypto investor who goes by the X handle “notxavierj” claims to have raked in over $1 million from the Solana-based JUP airdrop.

41% of all eligible wallets have now claimed their JUP tokens, with a total of 566 million JUP — 57% of the total airdrop allocation — being claimed since the airdrop went live at 10 am EST on Jan. 31, per Dune Analytics data from Osk2020.

Traders pumped and dumped another ‘JUP’ during $700M Jupiter airdrop image 1 More than 176,000 wallets claimed their airdrop within the first hour. Source: Dune Analytics

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