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Over the weekend, Jupiter’s anonymous founder used racist slurs multiple times in an X-post — and the Solana DeFi giant’s competitors saw an opportunity.
The post came in response to another anonymous account asking if a memecoin with the Jupiter slur could be verified. Meow, the founder of Jupiter, left the post up for about a day, arguing that he had no malicious intent in making the post. He also reposted an “n-word pass,” writing that he “didn’t know there was such a big difference between r and a” regarding the slur.
Some pointed out that meow isn’t American and “sees everyone using the term online,” so he may not have understood the word’s potential hurtfulness.
Yet the response from the crypto community was swift and largely negative, with Solana ecosystem leaders denouncing the behavior and multiple posters promising to sell Jupiter’s native token. Meow eventually apologized for the post, saying: “Racism is obviously completely unacceptable and I love you all.”
However, the market didn’t seem to care much about the incident: JUP fell 7.7% in the last 24 hours, but several major Solana DeFi tokens retreated 5-10% in that time frame, and JUP’s fall occurred several hours after meow. racist comment. JUP traded relatively flat on Saturday and even seemingly saw its price increase against other Solana DeFi tokens immediately after the post.
Jupiter’s killer feature is a so-called aggregator that automatically routes user swaps across multiple locations to achieve the best possible price for users. In short, you get more value per dollar when you trade on Jupiter than on, say, Phantom or Coinbase.
Jupiter has a pretty big limitation with this feature, as we wrote earlier, but potential competitors saw an opportunity after the minus of meow.
Solana-compatible swap app DFlow essentially came out of stealth after the faux pas and posted instructions for how developers could switch their APIs from Jupiter. The DFlow founder wrote that “crypto needs a massive cultural change,” citing Meow’s post as evidence.
“After the Meow posts over the weekend, I guess [it’s] It is becoming clear to everyone that there needs to be a reasonable competitor for their barter product,” Chris Chung, CEO of Solana-based aggregator Titan, told me in a text message.
However, Chung added that “value is everything,” and that all of Jupiter’s competitors would have to significantly outperform Jupiter to convince users to switch.
I think another part of this story, if it becomes a story at all, might be the institutional side of things. Risk-averse institutions moving into crypto will likely want to do business with professional-looking founders, and posting racist comments on social media will likely be out of the question.
