A weekly recap of the most insightful news, analysis, and capital flows in the wild west we call crypto.

Hello and welcome back to the Web3 Rewind! Per usual in this industry, lots has happened this past week. Here's what we have in store for you:

• Solana is having a moment

• Jupiter airdrop succeeds without a hitch

• Sui TVL growth

• Uniswap cross-chain strategy

• Invesco Galaxy lowers ETF fee

• Unibot on Solana, new token?

The Latest

Solana’s moment

Airdrop dept.

Jupiter is a go

The year has barely begun, and it’s already been airdrop galore. This week’s airdrop hall of fame goes to Jupiter, Solana’s top DEX aggregator. Over 80% of Solana’s organic DEX volume is routed through Jupiter, and that market dominance has sustained for the past two years. It’s safe to say that there is not much competition from, quite frankly, anyone else on Solana. To be eligible for this airdrop, one had to swap using Jupiter’s aggregator, and obviously, the more volume you swapped, the larger airdrop you received based on various tiers.

Jupiter’s airdrop is likely one of Solana’s largest events in the past year, with the MadLads mint that took place in 2023 being a close second. This represented an opportunity to test a wide variety of mechanisms and the network itself. In fact, the Jupiter team was so worried about breaking the network that it held a mock airdrop claimable by hundreds of thousands of wallets to ensure they had the infrastructure in place. This included various bot mitigation strategies, including throttling the maximum number of tokens per swap and having a steep price curve.

With that small (but not really small) pilot test out of the way, the stage was set for the final event. On Wednesday morning, the Jupiter airdrop took place, and immediately, Solana activity skyrocketed. TPS roughly doubled from what it normally is, and the amount of MEV activity and network throughput skyrocketed as the network buckled under the immense transaction load. However, as the dust settled, the naysayers were proven wrong, and Solana stood the test. Sure, there were periods of deteriorated network performance, and it probably took the average user a while to land his transaction within a block, but the network did not go down. Solana haters have traditionally used the argument that “Solana can go down anytime and has gone down in the past” as their one-size-fits-all argument. But if the Jupiter airdrop didn’t bring down Solana, it’s safe to say that the network has become pretty resilient over the past year.

This was an interesting token launch; exactly 0% was reserved for investors. Something that you almost never see in crypto. It’s hard to overstate how significant this is as most token launches are riddled with investors with various vesting schedules, and holders will always be worried about the overhang. Another unique element of this airdrop was the usage of a launch pool. To quickly describe it, the launch pool was a liquidity pool seeded with 250M JUP tokens (2.5% of the total supply), and this allows any user who wants to buy JUP on the open market the opportunity to do so. It’s also hard to overstate how cool this is, as protocols can set up an entirely custom liquidity curve that allows the community to buy various amounts of tokens at custom-set prices, and provide buyers with what is currently $140M in liquidity.

The last interesting point is future token usage. Jupiter has committed to airdropping 10% of the token supply every January for the next three years. Which at current valuations, would equate to ~$684M given out. Can you imagine telling a web2 company that this crypto company has $684M in incentives that they can give out every year to grow? I’m sure Uber would have salivated at the idea of having an extra $684M to compete with Lyft or if Adam Neumann could’ve spent $684M a year in driving demand for WeWork. What a crazy industry we work in. — Joseph Cooper, Decential Media

Quick Bits

Sui’s growth

• Sui is another L1. Yes, I know, we have way too many. But Sui has some really interesting consensus mechanisms and uses a new, arguably much better, programming language to power its VM.

• It has seen its TVL shoot up 4x over the past three months, and DEX volume increase even more than that. We’ve seen the demand for high performance blockchains, and Sui could be no different.

Uniswap cross-chain strategy

• Cross-chain is the new norm. As rollup after rollup launches, protocols are thinking deeply about their cross-chain strategy and whether they should even go cross-chain in the first place.

• One of the protocols saying yes is Uniswap, as they are looking to incentivize liquidity on various deployments on other chains and have notably noted new chains such as Monad as high-growth targets.

Invesco Galaxy lowering ETF fee

• Invesco Galaxy has dropped the fee for its BTC ETF. As the AUM wars continue, they have decided to drop their fee from 0.39% to 0.25%, matching others such as BlackRock, VanEck, and Fidelity.

• Fee competition in the ETF space is notoriously high, and it’s proving no different for the BTC ETFs. As a quick update, Blackrock’s ETF is now at $2.77B in AUM, and Fidelity’s is next in line at $2.35B.

And last but not least

Unibot on Solana

Unibot is a Telegram trading bot. It allows degens to buy and sell tokens through Telegram, which is probably the most popular messaging app in crypto. It first launched on Ethereum, where its product and, more importantly, token took the sector by storm (it generally helps when your token 20x’s from the launch price). Unibot was originally only a product for Ethereum. However, as it saw Solana’s growing user activity and DEX volumes, and especially the meteoric rise of BonkBot, another Telegram trading bot on Solana, it decided to enter the arena. When I say meteoric rise, I truly mean it. In one month, BonkBot went from a 0% market share and a product that did not exist to having 82.2% market share by volume. Yep, you read that right. I’ve been a part of crypto for a while, and I don’t think I’ve seen any product take a sector by storm in such a short span of time. So what does Unibot decide to do? Launch a Telegram trading bot on Solana called Unibot on Solana (such originality).

Here’s the kicker. Unibot decided to launch a new token for Solana, UNISOL. At this point, if you’re a UNIBOT holder, your immediate reaction is to go, WHAT? But let’s pause for a second, it’s not that bad. UNIBOT holders will receive 80% of UNISOL supply, and 50% of revenue from the Solana Telegram bot will be directed to UNIBOT. So realistically, as a UNIBOT holder, you are looking at a less than 5% dilution, which really isn’t that bad if it means a product you know and love has a much larger treasury to grow adoption. Reasons stated by the team for this decision include increasing the adoption of the bot in the Solana ecosystem and the fact that the price of UNIBOT is so high, which is not a great thing for driving attention. This is called unit bias and is very much a genuine phenomenon in crypto, especially in Solana where popular meme tokens such as BONK trade at a price of $0.000001028. However, one can argue it is perhaps all a little too convoluted. It would be akin to Apple launching a new stock for every new product they released. AAPLAirpods, AAPLVisionPro, AAPLIPhone. That would be incredibly messy, and each of the individual stocks would be harder to hold than a combined stock. However, you can’t really blame Unibot for making this decision. Crypto participants like new shiny things and a fresh chart, and unfortunately, our behavior enables launching a new token for every new chain that a product deploys on. — JC

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.