Solana’s resurgence is partly fueled by lucrative airdrops from its ecosystem projects, with Jito's recent $250 million distribution being a prime example. This has led to a growing trend of users moving liquidity to Solana in anticipation of similar high-value airdrops from other projects.
During the recent market uptrend Solana has seen a strong recovery. One key factor behind this growth is Solana’s ecosystem projects, which have successfully attracted new liquidity and users through airdrops. Consequently, many crypto users are now actively moving liquidity to Solana to farm potential airdrops.
The excitement around Solana’s airdrops peaked recently with Jito, a liquid staking protocol, which distributed over $250 million to its users. This launch placed the airdrop among the largest in both the Solana ecosystem and the broader crypto space.
Jito’s governance token, JTO, was distributed to 10,000 eligible users, in allocations ranging from 4,941 to 104,391 tokens. At its current $3 value, these allocations are worth over $14,000 and $300,000, respectively. Remarkably, eligibility for the $14k airdrop required staking less than $40 on the platform.
As a liquid staking protocol, Jito is often compared to Ethereum’s Lido. However, despite its somewhat high fully-diluted valuation of $2.5 billion, Jito’s TVL of $465 million significantly trails behind Lido’s $21 billion TVL.
JTO is not the first large airdrop distributed recently. Last month, Pyth Network, a leading blockchain oracle provider, distributed an $87 million airdrop to its community. Recipients received an average of 2-4k tokens each, now valued at over $1,000. Initially launched on Solana, Pyth has since expanded to multiple chains, positioning itself as the first serious competitor to Chainlink.
Solana users are currently anticipating another airdrop from Jupiter Exchange, which plans to distribute tokens to over 950,000 wallets on the Solana network. To qualify, users must have completed a minimum of $1,000 in swap volume on the protocol. Considering Jupiter's current trading volume, which is comparable to Uniswap v3, this airdrop could also be substantial.
Observing this success, several other Solana projects that have not yet issued tokens are now seriously considering initiating their own airdrops.
Kamino Finance, one of Solana's fastest-growing DeFi protocols offering leverage trading and lending/borrowing services, has recently introduced a points system. By engaging with the protocol, users can accumulate points, which they will later have the opportunity to exchange for tokens.
Many Solana users are also awaiting an airdrop from Tensor, the largest NFT marketplace on Solana. The platform has also introduced a points system and intends to launch its own token in the future. Interestingly, one method of earning points on Tensor involves purchasing their official NFT, Tensorian. Over the last 30 days, Tensorian’s price has surged by a factor of 14 and is currently hovering at around $7,000 per piece.
If the market maintains its growth trajectory, the airdrop frenzy is likely to continue and may even spread to other chains. Therefore, it could be worth considering the use of protocols that have not yet issued tokens. With minimal effort, this strategy can sometimes yield significant returns.