Jupiter Founder Meow to Critics of JUP Airdrop: ‘Give Me a Break’

Meow responded to those who said that Jupiter unfairly enriched itself in the airdrop at the expense of the protocol’s community.

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While Solana DeFi protocol Jupiter staged what was by most measures a very successful airdrop launch on Wednesday, achieving a market cap of close to $800 million, the company’s critics pointed out numerous ways the company seemed to unfairly enrich itself in the process. While Jupiter’s founder, who goes by the pseudonym Meow, acknowledges he might have done some things differently, he finds the criticisms of the launch mostly based on “bad faith” and misinformation.

Meow joined Unchained to discuss the thinking behind the launch mechanics of JUP, how the prior launch of meme-coin WEN served as a dry run for JUP, whether the aggressive pricing strategy of JUP was a mistake, and what he hopes to achieve with Jupiter next, including the possibility of enabling companies of all kinds to list themselves publicly on chain.

Show highlights:

What Jupiter is and how it extends its functionality beyond mere token swapping
What users are primarily utilizing the dollar-cost-average feature of Jupiter for
Meow’s background in crypto and how he ended up in the Solana ecosystem
Why a launchpad seemed the ideal choice for Jupiter's token launch
What prompted the decision to release WEN, a memecoin, before launching JUP
Meow's response to criticisms regarding the launchpad's mechanics
Whether the aggressive pricing strategy for Jupiter was a misstep
How Meow feels about being targeted for criticism
What's on the horizon for Jupiter as a platform following the airdrop

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Guest |

Meow, cofounder of Jupiter

Links |

Unchained:

Pro-Ethereum Crowd Slams Solana-based Jupiter Airdrop as ‘Absolute Trash’

Jupiter Traders Claim Whopping 545 Million JUP Tokens in First 8 Hours of Airdrop

Jupiter’s Airdropped Token JUP Debuts at a $878 Million Market Cap

Breakpoint 2023 Meow conference

The Block: Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter confirms token release date

Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.

HOST

Laura Shin

Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and author of “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (Public Affairs, 2022). Formerly a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full-time, and her podcasts and videos have had more than 15 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and has a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.