Jupiter dev’s WEN airdrop introduces new Solana NFT standard – DL News

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GM, Tim here.

Here’s what caught my DeFi eye recently:

Excitement over Jupiter’s token launch is reaching a fever pitch

Jupiter dev whets appetite with WIN

After a wait of more than two months, Jupiter is making the final preparations before his signs scheduled for January 31st.

As the largest decentralized exchange aggregator not only on Solana, but in all of DeFi, expectations for Jupiter’s airdrop are high.

Jupiter developer Ming Ng took the excitement to another level late last week when he and the Ovols team launched WEN – a so-called memecoin created using Solana’s new token extensions and through Jupiter’s LFG launchpad was introduced.

WEN was dropped to over a million wallets – including active Jupiter users, several top NFT collector holders and Genesis Saga phone holders. The one trillion WEN tokens rose almost immediately to over $100 million in total value.

On the surface, creating and airdropping WEN seems like little more than another way to inflate Jupiter before its token launch.

But under the hood, WEN acts as a proof of concept for the WEN New Standard – or WNS – a new, lightweight token standard for NFTs on Solana created by LFG. WEN is a WNS NFT fractionalized into one trillion fungible tokens.

The WEN launch also acted as a stress test for Jupiter’s infrastructure, its bot mitigation measures, and the Solana network as a whole.

While WNS is the first Solana NFT standard built with the 13 new token extensions the blockchain rolled out last week, it almost certainly won’t be the last.

Be on the lookout for other Solana projects that use the drawing standards to build new and innovative things in the future.

Euler HUB recovers lost driver’s licenses

Euler Labs CEO Michael Bentley told DL News that he has recovered the $3.8 million worth of driver’s licenses he said he lost at the start of the month.

On January 10, DL News managing editor Ekin Genç reported that Bentley had lost access to his EUL tokens after losing the private key of the wallet where they were stored.

Bentley’s approximately 1.2 million EUL tokens were lost, representing 4.4% of the total token supply.

In September 2022, when the token’s price peaked at $12.78, his holdings would have been worth around $15 million.

After the Euler Protocol suffered a $200 million hack in March, many assumed it would end even after it was able to recover the stolen funds.

But Bentley and Euler Labs pressed on. In January, they announced a new DeFi primitive called the Ethereum Vault Connector, which allows the lending protocol smart contracts to communicate with each other. The promise of future Euler launches helped push EUL up more than 159% from its 2023 lows.

Celo gets native USDC

Ethereum layer 2 Celo just became the latest blockchain to get a native USDC deployment. This is the 16th blockchain Circle that USDC has launched.

Native deployment means that Circle, the company behind USDC, has built the infrastructure for users to hit and redeem USDC directly on a specific blockchain. The benefit is that Circle now directly guarantees native USDC trading on Celo.

Not all USDC trading on blockchains is deployed natively. Some blockchains use bridged versions of USDC. It works by allowing users to lock up native USDC on another blockchain, and then issue a placeholder token on a destination chain.

While such bridges are convenient—it’s often faster to build bridges instead of waiting for Circle to go through the process of native deployment—they are much less secure.

Because these types of token bridges hold users’ USDC deposits, often in multi-signature wallets, they are susceptible to hacks and exploitation.

Previous hacks at the Ronin Bridge, Muiltichain, and several others highlight the risks of such bridges.

As Circle deploys USDC natively on more chains, it will increase interoperability in DeFi and make blockchain ecosystems more secure.

But for Circle, which plans to IPO in the US later this year, it needs to make sure it doesn’t run afoul of regulations doing so.

Data of the week

Solana activity picks up again in the lead up to Jupiter’s sign launch.

Active wallets and new token deployments had the most prominent increases, but other metrics, such as transaction count and network fees, also increased in the past week.

While new token deployments have surpassed their December high, active wallets have not.

This week in DeFi management

PROPOSAL: Cosmos wants to make asset issuance easier by onboarding Noble as a new consumer chain at the Cosmos Hub

VOTE: Arbitrum votes on changes to its constitution and the election process of the Security Council

VOTE: Euler requests more funding for the Euler Foundation

Post of the week

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams adds to the growing criticism of the points epidemic sweeping crypto.

What we watch

CherryWorm and several others have noticed that the stablecoin transfer volumes on Solana have skyrocketed in recent weeks.

Solana-based decentralized exchange Phoenix confirmed to DL News that the increase in transfers is due to how transactions are processed on the exchange.

When market makers create and cancel orders on Phoenix, as they routinely do thousands of times a day, those unfinished trades technically count as transfers.

The situation caused much confusion among analysts, who interpreted the increased transfer volume as actual trading volume.

Got a tip on DeFi? Reach out to [email protected].