Airdrop from Jupiter Swap

Author: Some guy

Tue Feb 06 2024

BLOCKCHAIN - One of the many terms that you hear thrown around the blockchain ecosystem is "airdrop".  What that means is that some entity, be it an NFT collection, or some service, wants to reward existing users, or try to gain new users by dropping some stuff on them for free.  I can't believe that I've written so many different articles about all this stuff, and not once have I mentioned that term.  Well, I'm here today to tell you a story about an airdrop that was unexpected and awesome all at once.  If you don't take anything else away from this story, the bottom line is that, sometimes you get lucky, and stuff happens that you didn't expect.

Let us begin framing the story by explaining the services involved.  I'll try to keep this simple and easy to understand.  I already know that if I just start jawing on about DeFi, Dapps and Raydium, many of you will just close the browser window and find something else to do.  So what say I just start with DeFi.  DeFi means Decentralized Finance.  A Dapp is a DeFi Application.  All of the stuff you've ever read on here that talks about exchanges, or swapping, or NFT marketplaces, etc, are all Dapps.  In short, they are webapps that are written to facilitate blockchain transactions.

My story begins here...
I have a Phantom wallet specifically to hold cryptocurrencies that are centered around the Solana ecosystem. 

Two of my previous articles about PEPE and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, go into further detail about how and why I'm involved in those projects.  The Phantom Wallet is the place where I interact with those projects.

Among my favorite things you can do with some of the tokens on the SOL chain are that you can stake them.  You lock up some of your holdings on their system to provide liquidity, which is what allows the blockchain transactions to flow uninterrupted.  The liquidity is used as a pool to shuffle cryptocurrency around.  It's a central repository that holds all of the cash, and there is always some coming in and some going out.  The liquidity is how the system continues along without running out of funds.  Then, the system pays out a percentage of the fees paid to those that provide that liquidity.  A simple way of explaining this is that it is no different than how a bank pays you interest for leaving money in your savings account.  They use that money to conduct business, then they pay you for the use of your money.

For what it's worth, in my view, this is a WAY better system than the Bitcoin system that uses mining to perform all those functions.  The sheer amount of energy used by Bitcoin miners is absurd, and is literally becoming a serious environmental problem.  Such to a point that some countries have actually outlawed mining completely.

Anyway...  The Phantom wallet itself does not do any of this.  It is just a wallet.  In order to stake your coins, you need to use another service like Raydium.

You go to that site, connect your wallet, and you will see options for how you can use your various coins to collect a passive income.  

That is pretty much the short short explanation for how all of this stuff works.  And if I haven't been clear enough about this, yes, it's profitable.  Yes, it works.  And yes, millions of people are using these services all day and night.  It is that activity that keeps the blockchain alive.

Because I have a few hundred million NINJA token, I have a whole lot of that staked on Raydium.  Such to a point than I'm earning a few million every couple of days.  When I harvest the coins that I've earned, I immediately swap the coin to SOL.  Because SOL is the base of it all, is more stable, and more reliable.  And, more to the point, it's supported by Coinbase, so I just shuffle the SOL off to Coinbase when it's time to liquidate my holdings.

Here is where the story gets to be fun
When performing a "swap" between currencies, a service like the Phantom wallet will search around the different swap services to find the most favorable exchange rate with the lowest fees.  It does this automatically once you initiate a swap.  One of the services that it found to use is Jupiter Swap.  At the time, I didn't think anything of it.  I was just going through business as usual.

Then one day, I open up my Phantom wallet and I see a banner saying, "You have qualified for the JUP airdrop."  Evidently my activity on their system qualified me for an airdrop of their new token.  200 JUP was waiting for me.

The next morning, I went to make my claim.  It was legitimate.  And, here's the crazy part...  Normally airdrops like this amount to $5 or something.  I would have been surprised if it was $10.  To my surprise, the value of the 200 JUP was actually about $150!! 

This was astonishing to me!  That airdrop was worth more than all the activity that I had swapped through their system.  So I did what any normal person that wanted to preserve a profit would do, I immediately swapped about $100 worth of it to SOL and moved it to Coinbase.  I still held on to about 50 JUP between 2 wallets.  And we'll see if it holds it's value.  But for my part, that one airdrop was worth quite a lot already.

There is more to this too...  I went to check Discord and see what people were saying about that, because surely some people also had some good fortune.  As it turns out, there were two wildly different tales.  Some people were miffed because they missed out, and didn't even know about it.  And then there were others that scored drops in the $1000s area.  The amount you qualified for was tied directly to your activity.  Many other people are WAY more active than I am.  I'm a little fish after all.  I'm not moving $1000s of crypto around.  I never have that much on the blockchain at any given time.  But some others DO.  Those people that were moving mad money around got HUGE airdrops!  And more power to them.

As I said at the beginning of this story...
If you take nothing else away from this story, it is that sometimes you get lucky.  As my old poker buddies used to say, "you need to be in it to win it."  And that applies to this sort of thing.  Because had I not been here playing this game, I would not have had $150 fall out of the sky and into my waiting hands.  And now that I know that Jupiter exists, and that they are happy to dump a bunch of money out in order to generate new interest, I will absolutely make sure that I utilize their system more, as well as hold on to some tokens.  

I'm hoping that when the next drop comes through, it will be worth even more.

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