Some traders may have speculated on the price of the wrong token, while a 17-year-old trader claims to have raked in $1 million in airdrops of the real Jupiter token.
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.

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for creating and hosting decentralized applications (DApps), however, its official website says the protocol is “no longer active.”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.

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 $94 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."

Source - Coin telegraph