kash@kashdhanda
A Fresh Start for $JUP (Major Changes Coming)
This one is for the token holders. The ride or dies. The folks who have held through up and down, supporting a project they believe has the ability to change the future of finance.
We know it hasn’t been easy lately.
But here’s the good news: we hear you. And we’re moving to make changes inspired by your ideas and our deep reflections on what $JUP should be.
In classic Jupiter style tho, this is going to be a somewhat long essay. Before we can step into the new future, we must acknowledge the past and clearly articulate how we’re changing our approach going forward.
But if you read the whole essay, you’ll find 3 major changes that demonstrate how important your feedback has been over the last few weeks/months.
—-
Reflections on $JUP
The $JUP token was initially aimed to be the lynchpin of the Jupiter DAO. That worked quite well to kick things off.
Together, we built the largest and most active DAO ever. We regularly had hundreds of thousands of voting wallets, voted on 20+ proposals, and pioneered concepts like Active Staking Rewards before anyone else.
In a time where it’s rare to see DAO proposals get more than 100 voters, we showed it was possible to build governance that massive numbers of people cared about. We likely experimented the most amongst all the major protocols about what it means to be a community, a DAO and a platform - and we most certainly learnt a ton.
But there were also problems that only became obvious over time. Specifically:
- Mechanics of governance turned some potential holders away from the token - for example, the frequency of voting and the 30 day lockup.
- We were spending too much time and energy on public comms around the DAO, reducing the amount of attention on the Jupiter product suite and the overall Jupiter mission
- Budgeting votes for Work Groups created a massive divide in the token holder base and drew negative attention to $JUP
All these, combined, had one MAJOR disadvantage - attention was consistently drawn away from the great work of the team/community towards things that drew the ire of token holders.
Fundamentally, the previous setup was not additive to the $JUP token.
To move forward, we need to keep what was good, and change what was not.
/// Major Change #1: Scaling Back the DAO
After countless conversations with token holders, it’s clear that the Jupiter DAO is an important vehicle.
Many $JUP holders believe deeply in the power of community governance, and are excited to be able to share their opinions and shape the future of Jupiter.
But these conversations have also made clear that the DAO should be laser-focused on extremely high-leverage actions. The constant flow of votes was a drain on token holder attention, especially when vote subjects felt “small”.
The other thing was that the votes, a major major driver of community attention, constantly drawn attention to, and vastly
Going forward, the DAO will have a narrower focus on broad tokenomics decisions and major treasury stewardship items.
This means no more Work Groups, fewer overall votes, and more focus in our public comms on products and growth.
Token Holders can rest assured the conversation about Jupiter will not be dominated by politics, while still being able to effectively drive decision making around key items that affect our collective future.
We are also going to be refocusing the community energy away from politics and towards a pro-social core mission - onboarding the world to DeFi - as will be explained in a separate community post by @AlleyCatNY.
/// Major Change #2: Reducing the Unstaking Window
Initially, we created a 30 day lockup on staked tokens. Given that Active Staking Rewards were high and governance votes were very frequent, this made sense to ensure only those who were longer term aligned with the Jupiter mission would be able to participate.
But now, we stand at a critical juncture. The key is not only to find long-term aligned holders, but to create more of them. And, as we’ve heard from many token holders, the unstaking window of 30 days is too long and turns away potential buyers (particularly large-scale institutional buyers).
To meet in the middle, we are going to reduce the unstaking period to 7 days without any penalty. This ensures those who are participating in governance are not simply buying/dumping $JUP to cast a vote, while still giving token holders the flexibility they want and need.
This change should go live in the coming weeks.
/// Major Change #3: Burn the Litterbox (subject to a DAO vote)
Finally, to kick off this new chapter of the DAO, we want to start with a critical vote that has been the subject of MANY conversations with token holders: the Litterbox Trust.
The Litterbox Trust receives 50% of protocol revenues from Jupiter and uses those revenues to accumulate $JUP from the open market.
It currently holds over 121m tokens (~1.7% of the total supply, ~3.8% of circulating supply), and grows every hour.
The original plan was to hold a DAO vote after 2 years to decide what to do with the accumulated tokens. But we’ve heard two different critiques.
First, some token holders have suggested that holding a large amount of $JUP without clarity on how the tokens will be used is creating uncertainty. By far the most common suggested solution is to “burn” these tokens.
Second, some token holders have suggested that the buybacks themselves are not particularly effective. The solutions for this are more varied - some want continuous burns, some want increased investment in product growth, and some want other use cases of the revenue.
Deciding what to do with 1) the current $JUP holdings and 2) the ongoing revenues are both massive decisions. They are the perfect example of the types of decisions that the DAO can and should have active input on.
Starting today, we’ll hold a period of public discussion on the first question (Burning the Litterbox). This will continue for ~10 days, with a formal vote to Burn the Litterbox’s existing holdings shortly thereafter.
After that, we will have a separate conversation about whether the $JUP Accumulation Plan should be continued, or if there are much better uses for the revenue.
If you’re a token holder, now is the time to make your opinion known, and to get involved again in meaningful governance!
–
All three of these changes are concrete and tangible, but I want to also point out a more philosophical change that’s taken place within the team.
For a long time, we didn’t give JUP the type of attention we give to our products. Each product has a clear value proposition, a marketing plan, iterative improvement process, etc.
And for a long time, JUP didn’t have this. We expected the market to understand the value of JUP based on the strength of our products, community, and vision. That was a mistake. And one that we are already in the process of fixing.
Going forward, we’re going to give JUP the attention it deserves.
We need to be incredibly vocal about the Jupiter story, about the JUP story, and about the story of DeFi going forward.
And we’re going to be having more conversations in public about other long term use cases for JUP that will integrate into the future of Jupiter platforms.
So here’s my free advice - if you’re tired of seeing talk of Jupiter, switch to Bluesky 😉
