Solana's Jupiter DEX kickstarts native DAO with $137M in initial capital

The funds will be used to support ecosystem initiatives and reward long-term contributors.

Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) Jupiter is allocating 10 million USD Coin (USDC) and 100 million of its native JCP token ($127 million), worth a combined $137 million at the time of publication, to kickstart its Jupiter DAO.

As announced on March 27, the budget “provides the DAO the capability to fund the ideas with USDC and have the JUP allocation for long term incentive alignment with J.U.P Catributors,” developers wrote, continuing: “To ensure that the DAO will be able to execute on these crucial things over the long term, we will aim to top up the same budget on a yearly basis.” For additional contributions, developers raised the following example: 

“If the DAO ends the year with 1.5M USDC and 50M JUP, the team will replenish 8.5M USDC from revenues and an additional 50M JUP will be transferred from the community cold wallets.”

At its inception, the ecosystem funds are stored in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) multisig wallet with three initial members, with plans to expand access to more custodians within the coming weeks. Parallel to the announcement, the Jupiter DAO wallet address was funded with two separate transactions of USDC and JCP. 

We have officially funded 10M USDC and 100M JUP into a DAO wallet.

This operational budget provides the DAO the capability to fund the ideas with USDC and have the JUP allocation for long term incentive alignment with J.U.P Catributors.

Besides LFG selection, the DAO will also…

— Jupiter (@JupiterExchange) March 27, 2024

Jupiter is currently one of the most popular decentralized applications on the Solana blockchain, with $381.49 million in total value locked (TVL), having grown 86% month over month. The DEX accounts for approximately 8% of the Solana ecosystem’s total TVL at the time of publication. The token currently has a fully diluted market cap of $12.5 billion. 

With a gain of 807% in the past year, Solana has become one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap. A huge part of that growth was driven by the recent memecoin craze. On March 25, Jeo Boden (BODEN), a Solana memecoin parody of United States President Joe Biden, surpassed $250 million in market cap with a gain of 54% within the past 24 hours. 

Related: Solana takes the lead in weekly stablecoin transfer volume