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Over the weekend, the anonymous founder of Jupiter used a racial slur multiple times in an X post — and the Solana DeFi giant’s competitors perceived an opportunity.
The post came in response to another anonymous account asking whether a memecoin containing the slur could be verified on Jupiter. Meow, Jupiter’s founder, left the post up for roughly a day, arguing that he didn’t have malicious intent when making the post. He also reposted an “n-word pass” and wrote that he “didn’t know that there is such a big difference between r & a” in reference to the slur.
Some pointed out that meow is not American and “sees everyone using” the term online, so he may not have grasped the word’s potential hurtfulness.
Still, the crypto community’s response was swift and mostly negative, with Solana ecosystem leaders calling out the behavior and multiple posters pledging to sell Jupiter’s native token. Meow eventually issued an apology for the post, saying, “Racism is obviously completely unacceptable and I love you all.”
The market didn’t seem to care much about the incident, however: JUP slid 7.7% over the past 24 hours, but multiple major Solana DeFi tokens drew back 5-10% over that time frame, and JUP’s fall occurred several hours after meow’s racist remark. JUP traded relatively flat on Saturday, and seemingly even saw its price increase relative to other Solana DeFi tokens immediately after the post.
Jupiter’s killer feature is a so-called aggregator that automatically routes user swaps across multiple venues to achieve the best possible price for users. In short, you get more value per dollar when swapping on Jupiter than on Phantom or Coinbase, for instance.
Jupiter has a pretty big moat with this feature, as we’ve written before, but would-be competitors spied an opportunity after meow’s snafu.
Solana-compatible swap app DFlow essentially came out of stealth after the faux pas, posting instructions for how developers could switch their APIs away from Jupiter. DFlow’s founder wrote “crypto needs a massive change culturally,” citing meow’s post as evidence.
“After the Meow posts on the weekend, I think [it’s] becoming clear to everyone that a reasonable competitor for their swap product has to come in,” Chris Chung, CEO of the Solana-based aggregator Titan, told me in a text.
However, Chung added that “value is everything,” and any Jupiter competitors would have to significantly outperform Jupiter to convince users to switch.
I think another part of this story, if it winds up being much of a story at all, could be the institutional side of things. Risk-averse institutions moving into crypto will likely look to do business with professional-seeming founders, and posting racial slurs on social media probably won’t fit the bill.