Original author: Luccy , BlockBeats
Original editor: Jack , BlockBeats
This year, the market has been extremely lacking in new narratives. The short-lived bull market brought by ETFs has not really injected new vitality into the crypto market. Meme has become the most profitable field, while the corresponding VC coins have been criticized many times. DeFi projects in particular have hardly made any waves in several rounds of capital rotations and are still in dire straits.
In order to restore 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.
Jupiter co-founder meow has been hiding in the crypto developer community. He has served as chief consultant for Instadapp, Kyber and Blockfolio, co-founder of the largest wrapped token wBTC, and one of the founding contributors of the Handshake project. However, these tittles 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: Token value comes from community consensus
In the interview, meow repeatedly emphasized the importance of community consensus. He criticized the current abuse of the word community in the crypto world, believing that only a strong consensus can truly be called a community, and it is consensus that shapes currency.
To this end, 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.
The 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 amid the cheers, so he decided to take the first step to transform these users who love Jupiter into a community.
Jupiter hopes to build the most dynamic, forward-looking, and non-expert community in the crypto space. To this end, Jupiter has established a dedicated working group for media channels such as Twitter, DC, websites, YouTube, and Reddit, which is operated by team members and community members.
With careful operation and maintenance, Jupiter has created a prosperous and lively community. According to similarweb data, Twitter accounts for 66.25% of all Jupiters social traffic. Overall, Jupiters social traffic accounts for 3.49% of 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 indirectly shows that Jupiter has a closer interactive connection with the community.
The upper picture is Jupiter, and the lower picture is Raydium
Thousand-person meetings are a daily routine
Just like how fan clubs use different abbreviations to screen their own small groups, Jupiter is also using its own unique language to build a core circle.
meow has been creating different abbreviations, and in most cases, he does not explain these abbreviations in words. You can only understand the meaning of the abbreviations by watching Jupiters Planetary Call. The audience seems to be happy to maintain a sense of pride that only I know, chatting in the comment area with abbreviations. If the bystanders want to fit in, they have to learn new words.
The Planetary Conference is live-streamed on YouTube and Twitter at the same time every Wednesday. Kash, the leader of Meow and Uplink, will host each episode, and other team members will share the latest developments of the project in detail, so that the community can have a deep understanding of the Jupiter ecosystem. Each YouTube episode has almost 4,000 views, and Twitter has tens of thousands of views.
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 YouTube views are mostly less than 500. When searching on Twitter with keywords, the first tweet on the homepage still shows 2022.
The left picture shows the Ethereum YouTube live broadcast column, and the right picture shows the Twitter search results with the keywords ETH and ACD
From the perspective of interaction, the comment area of Jupiter live broadcast is always full of interactive messages, even flooding the screen, but the interactive message area of Ethereum conference is mostly blank. Comments can be seen under each Jupiter video, while there are fewer comments under Ethereum conference, and there are even robot advertising comments.
The left picture is the Jupiter Planet Conference, and the right picture is the Ethereum Core Developer Conference
In terms of community proposals, DAO members can decide how Jupiter will allocate tokens to each working group. Among them, the Uplink working group budget has 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 have a passing vote ratio of over 70%, and abstentions are maintained below 15%.
From left to right are the budget proposals of 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 remaining reductions 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 passed, and received 274 million votes, setting a record for DAO voting rate.
Perhaps Jupiter thought that voting to decide token distribution was not enough, and published a draft agreement on July 31, which included that the distribution of JUP to date would be publicly reviewed every 6 months; if any tokens were released, 100% disclosure of token sales would be made; if any tokens were released from the reserve for strategic reasons, the release would be carefully managed to be proportional to market liquidity, ensuring that it was communicated at least 3 months in advance.
All wallets will be clearly labeled so that JUP usage can be easily tracked. Notably, all community allocated tokens will be distributed via DAO voting for full visibility.
In addition, in order to solve the PVP chaos of meme coins, Jupiter promotes PPP. According to meows explanation , the core focus of the PPP community cannot be to attract others and hope to abandon them, but to have more allies and jointly build a common long-term future.
In order to realize PPP, Jupiter first preached the concept of PPP and even held a planetary conference with PPP as the theme. In the one and a half hour live broadcast, meow and Kash talked to six meme players. The retail investors who participated in the meeting were not famous KOLs, and the meme recommended was not Golden Dog, but it still attracted thousands of viewers and swiped PPP in the comment area.
Subsequently, meow published an article to explain the PPP concept and held a PPP experiment, calling on the community to leave their Solana address in the comment section. Despite information asymmetry, the PPP experiment attracted hundreds of thousands of participants within a month.
Lets Fucking Go
In the process of answering questions, Jupiter realized that it was not enough to let the community just be a bystander to be truly active, and they should be involved and become part of the builders.
So Jupiter launched Launchpad and handed over the right to choose the project to be launched to the community. Jupiter DAO was born for this purpose. In February, Jupiter launched DAO. Participating in voting requires staking 50 JUP. As of now, the total number of staked JUP exceeds 350 million, and the unique addresses exceed 550,000.
After the first test proposal was passed, Jupiter immediately held the first LFG Launchpad vote, which attracted 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.
Jupiter not only allows the community to participate in voting, but also allows 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 their project introductions on the Jupiter forum . Therefore, not only the Jupiter team, but the entire Jupiter community can serve as the reviewer of the project. The degree of interaction between the project and the community is considered community sentiment, which becomes a major factor affecting Jupiters 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 have AMA meetings with Jupiter, which will increase the chances of community communication and review. After the live broadcast, these AMA clips will be edited and released again, and the number of views of each clip can reach thousands. The final winning project and Jupiter protocol token launch time.
From left to right, these are the three LFG champion projects Zeus, Sanctum, and deBridge. One of the AMA videos
The referendum greatly mobilized the enthusiasm of community participation. A large number of users participated in Launchpad like investing in local dogs. Therefore, LFG was jokingly called the abbreviation of Lets 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 carried out two rounds of LFG voting, and the page was visited more than 3.4 million times, which is basically consistent with the data.
As a platform that was officially launched in April and launched less than half a year ago, Jupiter Launchpad traffic is very outstanding compared with other Launchpad platforms. The four major on-chain Launchpad platforms that were popular at the end of last year with the Golden Shovel - Bounce Brand, BakerySwap, Analysoor, and TurtSat, but their total visits are only 355,000 times, about one-tenth of Jupiter.
If 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
The effort and results that Jupiter puts into community building can be said to be equal, and the team has proven that it has the willingness and ability to attract enough collaborators.
After the LFG rules were first announced, 20 project applications were submitted to 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 plunged, the second round of LFG voting started. The market did not leave much time for retail investors to react. People rushed to the next one after one died, 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 stages of the campaign. Its related videos uploaded to Jupiters official YouTube channel 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 in the first and third phases of LFG did not receive more than 60% of the support rate.
From left to right are the results of the first, second and third phases of LFG proposals
However, Sanctum was 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 deposited real money feel dissatisfied.
Related reading: Sanctums original dynamic airdrop, detailed explanation of airdrop rules and valuation
The project was chosen by the community, but ended up with a bad ending, which seems to indicate that consensus has not been reached. Jupiters original intention of launching Launchpad was to hope that the project could work with the Jupiter ecosystem and Solana. This is not only the direction of the projects development, but also one of the decision-making factors for community members to choose to launch a project.
LFG project application format, source: Jupiter Forum
But for community members, participating in LFG voting is like participating in an investment. If the project performs poorly, it means the investment has failed, so when voting, they will be more inclined to projects that are unique and have good advantages.
A person familiar with the matter told BlockBeats that projects that win LFG have good engagement, that is, a large number of users use their protocols. Personally, I voted for 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 strong financing backgrounds. Crypto Wei Tuo explained to BlockBeats that the voting logic of retail investors is influenced by VCs and CEXs, and they believe that only grand narratives endorsed by VCs 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 included 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, 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 projects of the same period, 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 is only invested by Token Ventures, 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 backed by VCs, what will be the selection criteria for 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 cannot make a judgment.
This is the paradox of the Launchpad model, CryptoWei Tuo believes that not only Jupiter, but also Launchpad platforms including DaoMaker and Seedify are essentially no different, that is, they all cancel on-chain indicators without reducing risk exposure.
In addition, because Jupiter focuses on fairness and deliberately downplays the vote-buying factor in voting, all users who have staked 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 formality.
Theres trust
Jupiter launched a new meme Launch - CAT Launch Mechanisms at the end of July and announced the first Launch project ASIANMOM.
When ZachXBT pointed out that 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 only increased. ALL IN CLUB held a space in time, which attracted more than 1,300 online listeners at one time, and even Irene appeared to share her own experience, but the consensus of the community did not seem to be strengthened by the heat.
Related reading: Jupiters collaboration with Irene Zhao sparked controversy, and the chain detective ZachXBT exposed the latters dark history
Not only the Chinese community criticized Irene, the English community was also eager to ask Jupiter for an explanation.
space That night, Jupiter responded to the 22nd Planetary Conference with the word trust. Meow said, When you dont have trust, PVP happens, but when you have trust, PPP happens. Irene also explained to BlockBeats that the meme Launch mechanism is complex and requires long-term commitments, such as long-term lock-ups, so it takes a lot of time and energy to interact with the community. It can be seen that Jupiter currently still regards faith as the main means of promoting PPP.
If the communitys trust in PPP came from Jupiters leading position in Solana, then the trust in ASIANMOM can only be guaranteed by transparency. Just as Jupiter responded to the community and ZachXBTs questions, Irene also said many times in the space that all token supply distribution will be very open and transparent.
Jupiters 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 AIAMNOM 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 the projects that submitted LFG applications are old concepts such as GameFi, NFT, Defi, and infrastructure. So Jupiter personally launched meme Launch to promote the PPP experiment. Irene also said in the space that the cooperation with Jupiter has long been determined, and the previously released PPP experiment content is the result of the joint discussion between the two parties.
LFG Launchpad Notes, Image source: Jupiter Forum
The day after the ASIANMOM explosion, meow connected with Iggy, the founder of MOTHER, for a live broadcast of 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 Irenes 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, At that time, the Telegram emoticon package based on IreneDAO had more than 1,000 downloads in 3 days. And all of them came from Web3 Telegram native users, and many industry bigwigs were paying attention.
The left picture shows the YouTube live broadcast of meow and Iggy, and the right picture shows the IreneDAO emoticon package on Telegram
Irene emphasized in space that the main reason for this collaboration is that meow likes the Asian mom narrative. After seeing MOTHER, meow, as a Chinese, hopes that Asia can also have its own mom. In meows eyes, the mom narrative is not just a meme, but also symbolizes a cultural unit that continues to spread.
meow also talked about how memes with the mom narrative in popular culture increase the memes appeal and memorability in terms of visual expression, and believes that this narrative symbolizes a perfect storm of emotional connection, polarization, and cultural understanding, making it an efficient and lasting meme. Therefore, Irene, who has a community base in Asian moms, naturally became Jupiters target of cooperation.
But no matter what the reason, this collaboration was like a surprise attack 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 Jupiters Launchpad, Uplink and airdrop teams have been discussing how to implement Launch, and most teams have participated in designing the Launch mechanism, Irenes previous experience inevitably made community members doubt her strength and ability to lead orders.
In addition, Jupiter has not made any substantial progress except for 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 cant change anything.
Best alternatives
Like JUP, avoid Launch, this may be the highest praise the community has given to Jupiter after Launchs frequent failures. It also indirectly shows that although the high community popularity has not brought strong consensus to Jupiter, it does not mean that seizing the attention economy is a wrong decision.
DeFi has performed poorly overall in this cycle. According to Dune data , DEX daily trading volume reached 4.26 billion US dollars, of which Uniswap accounted for half. However, according to DeFiLlama data, Uniswaps 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 that in addition to the worrying project itself, this may also be related to the altcoin market.
Feng Wuxiang believes that in the last bull market, new narratives such as the Metaverse, NFT, and GameFi emerged. Most copycat projects can rise as long as their concepts match the hot spots, and in this cycle, 99% of the copycat projects reached their peak as soon as they opened. Except for the meme on Solana, there are no real projects that have succeeded.
It is precisely because the meme craze is becoming more and more frequent that TGBot, which can provide copy trading, data analysis, asset cross-chain and other functions, has further suppressed the DEX market. According to Dune data , Banana Guns trading volume achieved a trading volume of US$5 billion during the meme craze, and 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 surpassed MetaMask, Curve Finance, and Raydium in terms of revenue. Its 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.
Comparing only the DEX track, Solana DEX seems to have improved slightly. According to Deflama data , the DEX transaction volume on Solana reached US$55.876 billion in July, while the Ethereum DEX transaction volume was US$53.867 billion during the same period, which also means that the monthly DEX transaction volume 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 drained by Raydium for a long time. Dune data shows that most of Solanas DeFi players are distributed in Raydium. Although pump.fun has been seizing Solanas 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
Moreover, according to Messari ’s second quarter ecosystem report on Solana , Raydium became the main beneficiary of pump.fun, increasing its average daily trading volume by 77% month-on-month to $867 million and its TVL to $991 million, making it 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.
With TGBot stealing the market in the front and DEX competing in the back, Jupiter is willing to cut its feathers in order to attract long-term players and funds, and going beyond the circle is also a methodology.
From the legendary story of pizza and Bitcoin to the advent of Ethereum and then to Musk promoting Dogecoin, each cycle has a unique narrative of breaking out of the circle. This round of the circle has the Bitcoin bull market brought by ETFs outside the circle, and the meme bull market led by Solon inside the circle. The celebrity entry into the meme may be the opportunity that Jupiter has seized to break out of the circle.
In the communication with Iggy, meow firmly expressed his hope to become the first real Alpha. In his opinion, only by becoming the first celebrity to prove the celebrity project and achieve long-term success can one be a real Alpha. Introducing celebrities, creating a publishing platform, and brand cooperation are very important for increasing visibility and generating revenue. Jupiter hopes to create a roadmap to guide and increase awareness of specific tokens through cooperation and merchandise.
This is essentially a competition for attention. But Irene doesn’t think it’s a good time for Web2 stars to enter the market. She explained to BlockBeats, “Currently, Web3 is mainly on-chain players, and they are not willing to pay for Web2 stars.”
In addition, if Web2 celebrity-led projects want to be successful, they must have a certain degree of popularity in Web3. “It’s not just anyone who posts a selfie NFT that can become popular,” Irene added. “At the time, they wanted to copy IreneDAO but failed because they didn’t understand how memes and Web3 work.”
When asked whether PPP will be promoted in the Web2 community, Irene said, The Web2 community doesnt even know about PVP yet, so its a bit too early to talk about PPP. In addition, most Web2 stars are only driven by the money-making effect and are not really interested in this industry.
But Jupiters 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 the interviewees
