The most active community produces the most disappointing Launchpad. What did Jupiter do wrong?

Written by: Luccy, BlockBeats

Edited by: Jack, BlockBeats

Since the beginning of this year, the market has been extremely lacking in new narratives. The short-lived bull market brought about by ETFs has not really injected new vitality into the crypto market. Meme has become the most profitable field, and the corresponding VC coins have been criticized many times. Especially DeFi projects, which have hardly made waves in several rounds of capital rotations and are still living in dire straits.

In order to return value, value coins are looking for their own breakthroughs. "Community consensus" is the unified answer they give, and community activity has become an indicator for them to judge the strength of consensus. Jupiter is one of "them".

Meow, co-founder of Jupiter, has been hiding in the crypto developer community. He has served as chief advisor to Instadapp, Kyber and Blockfolio, is the co-founder of the largest wrapped token wBTC, and is also one of the founding contributors of the Handshake project. However, these titles have never allowed meow to disclose his identity. It was not until two days before the JUP airdrop that meow made a public appearance and accepted an exclusive interview with Capital Club founder Luke Belmar.

Related reading: "Dialogue with Jupiter founder Meow: The value of tokens comes from community consensus"

In the interview, meow repeatedly emphasized the importance of community consensus. He criticized the current abuse of the term "community" in the crypto world, believing that only a strong consensus can truly be called a "community", and it is consensus that shapes currency.

For this reason, Jupiter has invested a lot of energy in building and maintaining the community. In addition, after the PPP experimental partner Irene Zhao went bankrupt, and the JLP contract platform withstood the plummeting market and became the "best bidder", Jupiter attracted enough attention to the community, but this attention did not seem to bring much value increment to JUP.

Hottest DEX Community

At the Solana Breakpoint hackathon a year ago, meow's speech was hailed as one of the most popular speeches. Meow felt that consensus had been accumulated in the cheers, so he decided to take the first step to convert these users who loved Jupiter into a community.

Jupiter hopes to build the most dynamic, forward-looking, and non-expert community in the crypto field. To this end, Jupiter has established a special working group for media channels such as Twitter, DC, websites, YouTube, and Reddit, and the team members and community members are responsible for operation.

Under careful operation and maintenance, Jupiter has created a prosperous and lively community. According to similarweb data, Twitter accounts for 66.25% of all Jupiter's social traffic. Overall, Jupiter's social traffic accounts for 3.49% of the website traffic. Compared with Raydium, which is also known as the new leader of Solana, Jupiter is better at converting social media communication influence into traffic, and mainly relies on Twitter for communication. This also shows from the side that Jupiter has a closer interactive connection with the community.

The picture above is Jupiter, and the picture below is Raydium

"Thousands of people meeting" is a daily routine

Just like the fan circle uses different abbreviations to select its own small groups, Jupiter is also using its own language to create a core circle.

meow has been creating different abbreviations, and in most cases, he does not explain these abbreviations in words. Only by watching Jupiter's Planetary Call can you understand the meaning of the abbreviations. The audience also seemed to be happy to maintain a sense of pride that "I am the only one who understands", chatting in the comment area using abbreviations. If bystanders want to fit in, they have to learn new vocabulary.

The Planetary Conference is broadcast live on YouTube and Twitter at the same time every Wednesday. Kash, the leader of Meow and Uplink, will host each session, and the rest of the team will share the latest developments of the project in detail, so that the community can have a deeper understanding of the Jupiter ecosystem. The number of views on YouTube for each session can almost exceed 4,000, and the number of views on Twitter can reach tens of thousands.

The left picture shows the Jupiter YouTube live broadcast column, and the right picture shows the Twitter live broadcast of the 20th Jupiter Planetary Conference

Looking at the entire crypto ecosystem, it seems that only Ethereum can complete this workload. Ethereum holds a core developer conference call every week, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation. As a live conference that has been held for hundreds of sessions, its average number of views on YouTube is mostly no more than 500. When searching on Twitter with keywords, the first tweet on the homepage is still displayed in 2022.

The left picture shows the Ethereum YouTube live broadcast column, and the right picture shows the Twitter search results with "ETH" and "ACD" as keywords

From the interactive level, the comment area of Jupiter's live broadcast can always be interactive and even swipe the screen, but the interactive comment area of the Ethereum conference is mostly blank. Comments can be seen under each Jupiter video, while there are fewer Ethereum conferences, and there are even robot advertising comments.

The left picture shows the Jupiter planetary conference, and the right picture shows the Ethereum core developer conference

In community proposals, DAO members can decide how Jupiter will allocate tokens to each working group. Among them, the Uplink working group budget had the least number of votes, about 178 million. But even with the current number of JUP staked, the voting rate four months ago was still over 50%. In addition, most proposals passed with a vote share of over 70%, and abstentions were maintained below 15%.

From left to right are the budget proposals for the core working group, website working group, Catdet (DC) working group, Reddit working group, and Uplink working group

In addition, in order to further "get closer to the people", Jupiter proposed a proposal to reduce the token supply in mid-June, and the team voluntarily cut 30% from the allocated tokens, and the token emission was reduced by 30% accordingly. The rest of the reduction will come from previously allocated allocations, such as limited partnerships and strategic reserves. The proposal was carried out on August 1, and more than 160 million votes were collected in just half a day. In the end, 95% of people voted in favor and received 274 million votes, setting a record for DAO voting rate.

Perhaps Jupiter believes that voting to decide token distribution is not enough, and on July 31, it published a draft agreement, which includes that the distribution of JUP to date will be publicly reviewed every 6 months; if any tokens are released, 100% disclosure of token sales; if any tokens are released from the reserve for strategic reasons, the release will be carefully managed to be proportional to market liquidity, ensuring that it is communicated at least 3 months in advance.

All wallets will be clearly labeled so that the use of JUP can be easily tracked. It is worth noting that all community-allocated tokens will be distributed through DAO voting for full visibility.

In addition, in order to solve the PVP chaos of meme coins, Jupiter promotes PPP. According to meow's explanation, the core focus of the PPP community cannot be to attract others and hope to abandon them, but to have more allies and build a common long-term future together.

In order to realize PPP, Jupiter first preached the concept of PPP, and even held a planetary conference with the theme of PPP. In the one and a half hour live broadcast, meow and Kash talked to 6 meme players. The retail investors who participated in the meeting were not famous KOLs, and the meme recommended was not the Golden Dog, but it still attracted thousands of viewers and swiped the comment area for PPP.

Subsequently, meow published an article to explain the PPP concept and held a PPP experiment, calling on the community to leave the Solana address in the comment area. Despite information asymmetry, the PPP experiment attracted hundreds of thousands of participants within a month.

「Let's Fucking Go」

In the process of constantly answering questions, Jupiter realized that it was not enough to let the community be a bystander to be truly "active", and they should be allowed to participate and become part of the builders.

So Jupiter launched Launchpad and handed the right to choose the launch project to the community, and Jupiter DAO was born for this purpose. In February, Jupiter launched the DAO. Participating in the vote required 50 JUP staked. So far, the total number of staked JUPs has exceeded 350 million, and the number of unique addresses has exceeded 550,000.

After the first test proposal was passed, Jupiter immediately held the first LFG Launchpad vote, attracting more than 200 million JUP votes. It is worth noting that in Jupiter DAO, the voting rights held by the public are basically the same as those of whales. According to the data of LFG Phase 3 provided by Jupiter, the voting rights data and the independent voting wallet data are quite consistent. The winning projects obtained 59.4% of the voting rights and 60.7% of the independent voting wallets, respectively, and the data are close.

Not only did Jupiter make the community feel involved in voting, but it also allowed DAO members to participate in the entire process of Launchpad. Jupiter LFG Launchpad is divided into four steps, namely application, presentation, voting, and launch.

Applicants need to publish the project introduction on the Jupiterforum, so not only the Jupiter team, but the entire Jupiter community can serve as the project reviewer. The degree of interaction between the project and the community is regarded as "community sentiment", which has become a major factor affecting Jupiter's decision-making on candidates. In order to become a candidate, participating projects will have to pay attention to the dynamics of the Jupiter community at all times and answer questions for members. This positive feedback has gradually won enough traffic and attention for the entire ecosystem.

Candidate projects will be given a dedicated channel in the Jupiter official DC group and hold AMA meetings with Jupiter, which will increase the opportunities for community communication and review. After the live broadcast, these AMA clips will be edited and released separately, and each clip can be viewed thousands of times. The final winning project and Jupiter protocol token launch time.

From left to right, they are one of the AMA videos of the champion projects Zeus, Sanctum, and deBridge of the three phases of LFG

The referendum greatly mobilized the enthusiasm of community participation, and a large number of users participated in Launchpad like investing in local dogs. Therefore, LFG was jokingly called the abbreviation of "Let's Fucking Go". According to similarweb data, during the period of Launchpad, the LFG official website page was visited more than 3.23 million times. During the same period, DAO conducted two rounds of LFG voting, and the page was visited more than 3.4 million times, and the data was basically consistent.

As a platform that was officially launched in April and launched less than half a year ago, Jupiter Launchpad traffic can be said to be very outstanding compared with other Launchpad platforms. At the end of last year, the four major on-chain Launchpad platforms that were popular with "Golden Shovel" - Bounce Brand, BakerySwap, Analysoor, and TurtSat, but their total visits were only 355,000 times, about one-tenth of Jupiter.

Compared with off-chain platforms, the most active Binance Launchpad has launched 93 projects, with more than 5.5 million unique participants, and the number of launched projects and unique addresses are 10 times that of Jupiter. In the past three months, Binance has launched 6 projects, and its Launchpad website has received 6.26 million visits. LFG has launched 3 projects, but its visits are even slightly more than half of Binance.

Misplaced consensus

Jupiter's efforts and results in community building can be said to be equal, and the team has proved that it has the willingness and ability to attract enough partners.

After the LFG rules were first announced, 20 project applications were submitted on the Jupiter forum to participate in the first LFG election, and new project applications continued to appear. Countless meme communities shouted PPP and regarded Jupiter as a "revolutionary". Whether it is from social media interaction to DAO voting, or from participating in LFG to preaching PPP, Jupiter has attracted countless active users to participate in almost every initiative, but does high popularity really mean strong consensus?

What are you voting for?

The first-phase winning project, Zeus Network, was officially listed on Jupiter LFG Launchpad on April 4, with a total of 50 million ZEUS tokens, and ended at a price of $0.776. OKX immediately launched ZEUS, and the trading volume exceeded $100 million within 20 minutes of opening. However, the good times did not last long. After only one week, ZEUS could not withstand the market selling pressure and fell all the way to $0.185, a 10-fold drop from the opening price.

The day after ZEUS plummeted, the second round of LFG voting began. The market did not leave much reaction time for retail investors. People were like charging at the earth dog. After one died, they continued to charge at the next one, and once again put all their enthusiasm into the second round of voting.

The second phase winning project Sanctum connected with the Jupiter team several times in the early stage of the campaign. Its related videos uploaded to Jupiter's official YouTube have been viewed thousands of times and have received a lot of support from KOLs. Not only did it attract more than 230 million votes in the vote, becoming the LFG proposal with the most votes, but Sanctum also received 64% of the votes in this proposal, while the first candidate of the first and third phases of LFG did not exceed 60% of the support rate.

From left to right are the results of the first, second, and third phases of LFG proposals

But Sanctum has been caught in an airdrop crisis. On July 16, Sanctum officially opened the airdrop claim inquiry window. In the airdrop rules it formulated, the team selected 2,000 "sincere contributors" through active review to distribute 50 million tokens. These so-called "sincere contributors" refer to users who promote Sanctum on social media, which inevitably makes "points players" who have deposited real money dissatisfied.

Related reading: "Sanctum's original "dynamic airdrop", detailed explanation of airdrop rules and valuation"

The project was chosen by the community together, but it ended up with a bad ending, which seems to say that consensus has not been formed. Jupiter's original intention of launching Launchpad is to hope that the project can cooperate with the Jupiter ecosystem and Solana. This is not only the direction of the project's development, but also one of the decision-making factors for community members to choose to launch the project.

LFG project application format, source: Jupiter Forum

But for community members, participating in the LFG vote is like participating in an investment. Once the project performs poorly, it means the investment has failed, so when voting, it will be more inclined to those unique and good projects.

Informed sources told BlockBeats that the projects that won LFG have good participation, that is, a large number of users use their protocols. "Personally, I voted for those projects that can maximize my interests." For him, projects that he has used before or wants to use will be more likely to get his attention, "because launching through LFG will have a good boost to the project itself (and valuation), and I will also get project airdrops."

In addition, compared with the projects in the same period, the winning projects Zeus and Sanctum both have a strong financing background. Crypto Wei Tuo explained to BlockBeats that "the voting logic of retail investors is influenced by VC and CEX, and they believe that only grand narratives endorsed by VC have the hope of being listed on large exchanges."

Zeus announced in early April this year that it had completed $8 million in financing at a valuation of $100 million. Investors include Mechanism Capital, OKX Ventures, Animoca Ventures, The Spartan Group and other well-known VCs. Angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Stacks co-founder Muneeb Ali and Mechanism Capital founder Andrew Kang also participated in this round of financing.

Also as a winner, on April 4, Sanctum announced the completion of its seed round of extended financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from THE CMS, DeFiance Capital, GenblockCapital, Jump Crypto and Solana Ventures and other VCs. In addition, angel investors from projects such as LayerZero Labs and Drift Protocol also participated in this round of financing, with a total financing amount of US$6.1 million.

As for their peers, the top-ranked NFT lending protocol Sharky.fi and NFT liquidity protocol Banx also have financing backgrounds, but the investors and financing amounts are far less than Zeus. Among them, Sharky.fi only has Token Ventures as an investment, and the financing amount and financing date are unknown. Banx completed a $1 million seed round of financing in 2022, while DePIN infrastructure Uprock, clean energy network Srcful and MonkeyDEX have no relevant financing records.

Image source: rootdata

So if all candidate projects are not endorsed by VCs, what will be the selection criteria of retail investors? Crypto Wei Tuo cited the investment logic of meme coins to explain this problem. Meme coins themselves are unbacked cryptocurrencies, and their trading volume is much larger than that of VC coins. However, when they are put together with VC coins for voting in Launchpad, people can’t make a judgment.

“This is the paradox of the Launchpad model,” Crypto Wei Tuo believes that not only Jupiter, but also Launchpad platforms including DaoMaker and Seedify are essentially the same, that is, they all cancel on-chain indicators without reducing risk exposure.

In addition, because Jupiter focuses on fairness and deliberately downplays the bribery factor in voting, all users who pledge JUP (at least 50) can participate in the voting. One wallet can only choose one project, and 1 JUP represents one vote. In this regard, Feng Wuxiang said, “This makes voting a form.”

There's trust

Jupiter launched a new meme Launch at the end of July, CAT Launch Mechanisms, and announced the first Launch project ASIANMOM.

When ZachXBT pointed out that its partner Irene Zhao had participated in fraudulent projects many times, Jupiter undoubtedly became the center of public opinion, and the topic of Irene and Jupiter has only increased in popularity. ALL IN CLUB promptly held a space, which attracted more than 1,300 online listeners at one time, and even Irene appeared to share her experience, but the consensus of the community did not seem to be strengthened by the popularity.

Related reading: "Jupiter and Irene Zhao's collaboration caused controversy, and the chain detective ZachXBT exposed the latter's black history"

Not only the Chinese circle criticized Irene, but the English circle also eagerly asked Jupiter to explain.

space That night, Jupiter's response at the 22nd Planetary Conference was "trust". Meow said, "When you don't have trust, PVP will happen, but when you have trust, PPP will happen." Irene also explained to BlockBeats that the meme Launch mechanism is very complicated and requires long-term commitment, such as long-term lock-up, so it takes a lot of time and energy to interact with the community. It can be seen that Jupiter currently still regards "belief" as the main means of promoting PPP.

If the community's trust in PPP came from Jupiter's leading position in Solana, then the trust guarantee for ASIANMOM can only rely on transparency. Just as Jupiter responded to the community and ZachXBT's doubts, Irene also said many times in the space that "all token supply distribution will be very open and transparent."

Jupiter's transparency is obvious to all, but the funds of the projects Irene has participated in for three years are unknown, and this experience does not seem to have anything to do with the word "transparency". Although Irene said that she will have an 18-month token lock-up period in the AIANMOM project, and it is completely transparent and traceable, the seeds of doubt have been planted, and it is difficult for the community to pretend not to care.

Related reading: "Irene Zhao appeared in the community to respond to fierce doubts, what did Space say last night? "

In fact, Jupiter has never concealed its desire to send memes to Launchpad. As long as the meme is good enough, it can still apply to launch LFG. However, all projects that have submitted LFG applications are old concepts such as GameFi, NFT, Defi, and infrastructure. Therefore, Jupiter personally launched meme Launch to promote the PPP experiment. Irene also said in the space that the cooperation with Jupiter had been determined long ago, and the previously released PPP experiment content was the result of the joint discussion between the two parties.

LFG Launchpad Notes, Source: Jupiter Forum

The day after the ASIANMOM explosion, meow connected with Iggy, the founder of MOTHER, to conduct a live broadcast for more than 2 hours. In this conversation, meow emphasized the importance of building trust and recognition in the Web 2 world. Perhaps what Jupiter values is Irene’s common experience in both Web2 and Web3.

Before entering the Web3 industry, Irene had been an Instagram influencer for a long time. After crossing over to Konomi, she shaped her own brand image as CMO and accumulated enough Web3 popularity and fans in half a year. Irene explained to BlockBeats, “The Telegram emoticon package based on IreneDAO had more than 1,000 downloads in 3 days. And they were all from Web3 Telegram native users, and many industry bigwigs were paying attention.”

The left picture shows meow and Iggy's YouTube live broadcast, and the right picture shows the IreneDAO emoticon package on Telegram

Irene emphasized in space that the main reason for this collaboration was that meow liked the Asian mom narrative. After seeing MOTHER, meow, as a Chinese, hoped that Asia could also have its own "mom". In meow's eyes, the "mom" narrative is not just a meme, but also symbolizes a cultural unit that continues to spread.

meow also talked about how the meme with the "mom" narrative in popular culture increases the appeal and memorability of the meme in terms of visual performance, and believes that the narrative symbolizes the perfect storm of emotional connection, polarization and cultural understanding, making it an efficient and lasting meme. Therefore, Irene, who has a foundation in the Asian mom community, naturally became Jupiter's cooperation target.

But no matter what the reason, this cooperation is like a raid on the community. Due to the lack of strong consensus, the trust and faith accumulated by the community seemed to have collapsed the moment ZachXBT released the evidence.

Although Irene told BlockBeats that in order to make ASIANMOM successful, she and Jupiter's Launchpad, Uplink and airdrop team have been discussing how to implement Launch, and most teams have participated in designing the Launch mechanism, Irene's previous experience inevitably makes community members doubt her strength and ability to bring orders.

In addition, Jupiter has not made any substantial progress except promoting "trust". Therefore, when asked whether he is optimistic about the prospects of PPP, Feng Wuxiang said, "meme is PVP, meow is not a savior, and can't change anything."

The best alternative

"Like JUP, avoid Launch", this may be the highest praise from the community for Jupiter after Launch's frequent failures. It also shows from the side that although the high community popularity did not bring strong consensus to Jupiter, it does not mean that seizing the attention economy is a wrong decision.

DeFi as a whole has performed poorly in this cycle. According to Dune data, DEX daily trading volume reached 4.26 billion US dollars, of which Uniswap accounted for half of the market. However, according to DeFiLlama data, Uniswap's trading volume has been in a long-term stagnation since this year, with no obvious signs of growth. Therefore, DEX has to pay attention to the attention market, and LFG Launchpad and meme Launch are indispensable steps. The open and transparent LFG Launchpad can attract native traffic from Web3, and meme Launch in cooperation with Irene can seize the market potential of Web2.

The left picture shows the market share of DEX trading volume, and the right picture shows the changes in Uniswap's TVL and trading volume in 2024

The stagnation of DeFi development will be reflected in the altcoin market. According to Binance research, the MC/FDV of altcoins in 2024 is only 12.3%, the lowest in the past three years. Therefore, when asked about the poor performance of Launchpad, Feng Wuxiang explained to BlockBeats, "In addition to the worrying project itself, this may also be related to the altcoin market."

Feng Wuxiang believes that "in the last round of bull market, new narratives such as the Metaverse, NFT, and GameFi emerged. Most copycat projects can rise as long as the concepts are in line with the hot spots. In this cycle, 99% of the copycat projects are at their peak at the opening. Except for the meme on Solana, there are no real projects that have come out."

It is precisely because the meme craze is becoming more and more frequent that TGBot, which can provide functions such as copy trading, data analysis, and cross-chain assets, has further suppressed the DEX market. According to Dune data, Banana Gun's trading volume achieved a trading volume of US$5 billion during the meme craze. The current trading volume has exceeded US$5.6 billion, with an average daily trading volume of more than US$23 million.

In just one year, Banana Gun protocol has squeezed out MetaMask, Curve Finance, and Raydium in terms of revenue. The ability to attract millions of dollars even attracted the attention of Binance, which launched BANANA as the first HODLer Airdrops project on its seventh anniversary.

Compared only to the DEX track, Solana DEX seems to have improved slightly. According to Defillama data, the DEX trading volume on Solana reached US$55.876 billion in July, while the Ethereum DEX trading volume was US$53.867 billion in the same period, which also means that the monthly trading volume of DEX on Solana has surpassed Ethereum for the first time in history.

However, as the leader of Solana, Jupiter has been in a state of being sucked blood by Raydium for a long time. Dune data shows that most of Solana's DeFi players are distributed in Raydium. Although pump.fun has been seizing Solana's user market since its birth, Raydium is less affected than Meteora, another project of the Jupiter team.

The left picture shows the ranking of public chains by DEX transaction volume, and the right picture shows the total number of users of different DeFi protocols on Solana

Not only that, according to Messari's Solana's second quarter ecosystem report, Raydium has become the main beneficiary of pump.fun, increasing its average daily transaction volume by 77% month-on-month to $867 million and its TVL to $991 million, becoming the project with the highest TVL in the Solana DeFi protocol. In contrast, although Jupiter is still the main source of transactions for Solana, accounting for 51% of DEX transactions, its market share was surpassed by Raydium at the end of the quarter.

TGBot snatched the market first, and DEX competed later. Therefore, Jupiter is willing to "cut its feathers" to attract long-term players and funds, and going out of the circle is also a methodology.

From the legendary story of pizza and Bitcoin to the advent of Ethereum and Musk's promotion of Dogecoin, each cycle has a unique narrative of going out of the circle. This round of Bitcoin bull market brought by ETF outside the circle, and meme bull market led by Solon inside the circle. The entry of celebrities into meme may be the opportunity for Jupiter to go out of the circle.

In the communication with Iggy, meow firmly expressed his hope to become the first real Alpha. In his opinion, only the first celebrity who proves the celebrity project and succeeds in the long run is the real Alpha. Introducing celebrities, creating a publishing platform, and brand cooperation are very important for increasing awareness and generating revenue. Jupiter hopes to create a roadmap to guide and increase the awareness of specific tokens through cooperation and merchandise.

This is essentially a fight for the attention market. But Irene doesn’t think it’s a good time for Web2 stars to enter the market. She explained to BlockBeats, “The current Web3 is mainly on-chain players, and they are not willing to pay for Web2 stars.”

In addition, for Web2 celebrities to launch projects successfully, they must have a certain degree of popularity in Web3. “It’s not that just anyone can become popular by posting a selfie NFT,” Irene added, “At that time, they wanted to copy IreneDAO but failed because they didn’t understand meme and Web3 gameplay.”

When asked whether PPP would be promoted in the Web2 community, Irene said, “The Web2 community doesn’t know PVP yet, and it’s a bit too early to say ppp.” In addition, “most Web2 stars are only driven by the money-making effect and are not really interested in this industry.”

But Jupiter's idea of specializing in the attention economy will not change because of this. It will still greedily seek every opportunity and grab every potential "believer". As meow said, "Most of the best entrepreneurs, politicians and influential people are hype masters because you need enough attention to take action."

Thanks to all interviewees in this article