coindesk.com
The Wen meme coin saw a sharp drop in price Monday as traders weighed how to value news that 27% of the airdropped token's supply would be burned.
The Solana-based token was trading over 30% below its daily high around press time, thanks in large part to a major plunge triggered by a whale seller who exited their position shortly after 11:00 AM on the East Coast.
That action was part of a "sell the news" event tied to the Wen project's decision to burn all tokens that went unclaimed during its three-day airdrop, which concluded Monday. Traders, it seemed, had already priced in the impact of the supply dropping by over 270 billion tokens.
In the Discord server for Jupiter, the protocol that facilitated the airdrop, pseudonymous crypto traders were licking their wounds. "Wen burn has no effect on price. Moonbois in the mud," wrote one who went by the name Sonofkarm.
The Wen burn capped a breakneck final prelude to the main event of so-called "Jupuary," a month of testing and preparation for Jupiter's own massive token airdrop. The trade routing protocol is to distribute 40% of its upcoming JUP token to its users on January 31.
"WEN was a fantastic test," Jupiter's pseudonymous co-founder Weremeow wrote on X Monday, explaining the launch offered a stress test for the same infrastructure that will soon distribute JUP.
However, Weremeow said the team had "one big fuckup" by accidentally stranding 100 tokens marked for airdrop in an engineer's account, who then improperly supplied the tokens to a trading pool. In the post, Weremeow said the unsanctioned activity was not an ethical issue, "just incredible dumbness."