It’s the most wonderful time of the year - Jupuary is nearly here!
Jupuary is our annual airdrop designed to Grow the Pie. Our goal is to send a gift to qualified users, invite them to contribute their ideas through governance, and continue expanding the best DAO in crypto.
The process of getting to this Jupuary was itself historic. For the first time ever, we raised the passing threshold to 70% of votes. Jupuary only works if it’s a unifying event, and we knew we needed a supermajority of the community on board before taking any steps forward.
In the first vote, that threshold was not reached. But thanks to the brand-new Verified Feedback system, we were able to account for the thoughts of real voters and reshape the proposal for the 2nd round of voting.
Not only did that vote pass, it passed with a stunning 87% of the community in favor!
For anyone watching at home, this is what meaningful governance looks like.
Now, with a unified community, tens of thousands of pieces of feedback, and hundreds of hours of community discussion, we are ready to share the structure of Jupuary 2025.
// New Year, New Approach
Last year’s Jupuary was wildly successful in setting the foundation for the JUP DAO. We airdropped 1 billion tokens to 955,000 wallets, including every wallet who had used Jupiter, bot or not.
But this year’s Jupuary will be very different, because the Jupiter community is now very different.
Last year, we had a single product (Swap). Now, we have a full portfolio of products that are among the best on Solana. As a result, we’ve more than 10x’d the number of users and more than 50x’d our total volume relative to last year.
With so many more users doing so much more volume, we have to change the structure of Jupuary. If our goal is to invite active users to the DAO, we need a compelling invitation. And the invitation will only be compelling if the size of the airdrop is meaningful.
To do this, we are instituting qualifying thresholds, stronger anti-sybil measures, and Swap Scores that take into account a range of variables (more on that later).
To put it bluntly: not everyone is going to get an airdrop this year, and many qualified wallets will get a smaller drop as compared to last year.
But the ~2m wallets that do receive the airdrop will be more likely to be real cats, more likely to participate in DAO governance, and more likely to help us accelerate towards a decentralized future.
And when it’s all said and done, Jupuary 2025 will be the largest qualified user airdrop in history.
// High Level Structure
We’re dividing the airdrop into three high-level categories this year:
1/ Users. The fuel that powers the Jupiverse. Users who have gotten value out of Jupiter products, seen our ethos in action, and care about the future of Jupiter products are the basis of Jupuary.
2/ Stakers. Our longest-term supporters. They form the heart of the Jupiverse. By including them, we give more governance power to those who have demonstrated belief in the future of Jupiter.
3/ Carrots. Based on community feedback, we felt it was important not to deploy all of Jupuary at once. A portion of the approved $JUP will go towards incentivizing Jupuary recipients to stake/hold their airdrop, while another portion will be used to run growth campaigns to bring more users to Jupiter.
Since growing the DAO is the primary focus of Jupuary, and because the number of users is an order of magnitude more than stakers, Users will receive the vast majority of the airdrop - 440m out of the 700m JUP.
To pay respect to the different types of users, we will break this category down into two sub-groups - Swap Users and Expert Traders. Swap Users engage with Jupiter Swaps, either via jup.ag or through our API integrations (e.g. through Phantom). Expert Traders use the other Jupiter products - Perps, LO, DCA, VA, and Ape - to execute more sophisticated trades.
At the same time, Stakers have been critical to the success of the DAO so far, and also merit inclusion in Jupuary. We want to ensure they have more governance power, given their long-term alignment with the Jupiverse. They will receive 60m tokens out of the 700m JUP.
And finally, we have the Carrots. This bucket will power programs that encourage more people to actively use Jupiter, contribute to the community, and stake their JUP. In total, 200m out of 700m tokens - will be set aside for Carrots.
Let’s get into the weeds.
// Swap Users
This year, we’re going with a tier-based approach to user airdrops. This is for a simple reason: power laws.
The top 10% Swap Users (more than $8k in volume) were responsible for 99% of the total swap volume, and the top 1% of Swap Users (more than $200k in volume) were responsible for 97% of the total swap volume. If we distributed linearly, everyone would receive .0033 JUP per $1 swapped, and a very small group of people would receive nearly all the JUP. This is counter to our primary goal of growing-the-pie, so tiers were the best option.
Based on feedback from awesome community members like @marinonchain and JUPWhale, we knew it was important to create multiple tiers at the lower levels. Smaller traders are an important growth area for Jupiter - if we can invite them into the DAO and make them feel appreciated, they are more likely to increase their usage and contribute their time to the DAO.
We also received feedback from people like @lochiejarvis201 and @Jeanlucbb0 that the tier structuring itself was important. The tiers needed to be standardized in a way that made it easy for everyone to understand and get excited about the airdrop. For that reason, we’re primarily relying on simple tier intervals at round numbers.
Many community members - like @_asimsy and @Crypto_Minion - also flagged the importance of removing sybils and bots from the airdrop. Including them would skew the qualifying amounts for tiers and would take JUP away from the earnest users we wanted to reward. To remove sybils and bots, we removed all wallets that:
- Traded for less than 3 weeks. These wallets weren’t dedicated Jupiter users, regardless of their volume.
- Had a 50+% failure rate for sending transactions on Solana (a dead giveaway that you run on code instead of food)
- Exclusively conducted rapid circular transactions (from token A to token B to token A again). These circular transactions are typical for arbitrage, rather than actual trading.
We identified 750,000+ wallets (!!) that fell into these categories. But given the sheer scale of Jupiter usage - more than 10m wallets - it is possible that some real users accidentally get labeled as sybils or bots. Don’t worry! If you were incorrectly labeled, you’ll have 3 months to appeal the decision and receive your Jupuary allocation.
Finally, we knew we couldn’t airdrop based purely on volume alone. This would be too easily gamable by sybils and bots. So created a Swap Score to give a more fine-tuned picture of Swap User behavior.
To do so, the team (particularly @9yointern, @YodaHeld, and @0xDoing) invested ENORMOUS amounts of time and energy. To build the Swap Score, we had to look at literally hundreds of millions of transactions made via Jupiter, normalize them all to the USD value of the tokens at the time, and then calculate the swap score with a variety of inputs.
If that sounds easy, let me assure you: it was not.
But the effort was worth it in order to meet the Jupuary goals. Here’s how the Swap Score works:
- All transactions over $5 are counted towards your Swap Score. Transactions below this amount are frequently (but not always) bots of one kind or another.
- Volume from sol-to-sol swaps (e.g. jupSOL <> SOL) is discounted heavily. These trades have very limited risk and were commonly used by farmers. However, there are many organic traders doing these types of trades, so we didn’t want to exclude them entirely.
- Volume from stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps (e.g. USDC<>USDT) is discounted very heavily. Daily swapping of stablecoins was a common farming technique which we wanted to avoid, without fully removing the legitimate cases from user volume.
- Volume for all other trades (e.g. JUP <> USDC) were counted at 100% of their nominal volume.
With that said, here are the final Swap User tiers:
But that’s not all! We’re also creating a special Swap Consistency Bonus. If you swapped in at least 8 months of the past year, you will get a bonus of 25 - 500 JUP, based on your tier. This bonus aims to reward our most loyal users, who are also the users most likely to understand the Jupiter mission and be excited about governance going forward.
// Expert Traders
Expert Traders are a major part of Jupiter’s growth, trying out new products and giving us feedback on more advanced product lines.
As mentioned, there are a s