Jito, the second largest protocol on Solana by total value locked, debuted its new governance token Thursday, continuing the recent trend of airdrops on the layer 1 blockchain.
About 10,000 unique addresses qualified for the airdrop, and based on current market prices, eligible addresses were recently receiving a minimum of over $9,000 in JTO at one point Thursday. Some users staked small amounts of SOL for large sums of JTO.
The airdrop to Jito community members acts “as a recognition of their contribution in bootstrapping the network and to facilitate robust governance participation,” according to a blog post.
JTO gives token holders voting power over Jito’s decentralized autonomous organization by allowing them to vote on proposals about staking pool fees, treasury management and contributions for ongoing development.
9,852 addresses claimed between $9.8k and $208k from the Jito airdrop today
All you had to do to qualify for tier 1 was play around with $40 onchain, and you walked away with $9,882 a few months later
This is a "bring people back into crypto moment"
Long live Jito pic.twitter.com/Db6wM52cpw
— Dan Smith (@smyyguy) December 7, 2023
The token is currently exchanging hands at $2.04, data from CoinGecko shows, and has a market cap of $242 million. Several centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, Bybit and MEXC have already listed JTO for trading.
Jito’s fully diluted valuation sits at nearly $1.8 billion, while liquid staking leader Lido’s LDO token stands at $2.4 billion. Fully diluted valuation is calculated by multiplying a token’s price by its total supply.
The token’s debut comes amid a revival in the Solana ecosystem. Solana’s total value locked – the amount of crypto assets deposited into the blockchain – has increased 115% in the past 30 days to around $700 million, per DefiLlama, vastly outpacing several other blockchain networks such as Ethereum, Avalanche, and Tron.
Jito’s token was launched roughly two weeks after a different Solana-based airdrop, namely blockchain oracle firm Pyth. The airdropped tokens have an 18-month claiming window and make up 10% of the total JTO supply. Unclaimed tokens funnel into a treasury governed by Jito’s DAO, overseen by JTO holders.
Read more: Paxos Bringing Stablecoin Issuance on Solana, Diversifying Beyond Ethereum
Jito, which launched in late 2022, is a liquid staking platform that aims to let users stake SOL tokens, which are locked up in validators to secure the Solana blockchain. It also provides liquidity to stakers by issuing JitoSOL, the protocol’s liquid staking token that represents the user’s initial deposit and accrued rewards.
UPDATE (December 7, 2023, 15:00 EST): Adds information about minimum amounts of JTO and fully diluted valuations and tweet, and updates sub-headline.
