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There’s a new meme coin making waves on Solana, and following in the tradition of surging Solana tokens like BONK and Dogwifhat (WIF), newcomer WEN is dominating the conversation following Friday morning’s airdrop for more than a million wallets.
WEN was airdropped via decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Jupiter as a large-scale test of its new launchpad, which will be put to use again next week when Jupiter kicks off an airdrop for its own token, JUP. Nearly a million wallets are eligible for the long-awaited JUP drop.
But WEN went even broader, with more than a million eligible Solana wallets—including active Jupiter users over the past six months, holders of a variety of popular NFT projects on the platform, and even owners of the Solana Saga smartphone.
Each wallet can claim an airdrop of 643,652 WEN, which at its current price of $0.00009095 is equivalent to over $58, per data from CoinGecko. WEN has climbed in price about 483% since the Friday morning drop.
Other data sources noted a short-lived pop in price as high as $2,915, according to CoinMarketCap, or $4,836 according to Birdeye. Both sites show the current price of WEN to be a roughly 100% drop in value from those startling peaks.
Those price pops appear to be outliers, but that didn’t stop Crypto Twitter from seizing on the opportunity to call out potential traders who got “rekt” buying WEN for hundreds or thousands of dollars per token immediately after the drop, despite the price quickly settling to a fraction of a penny.
IDK whats the intention of opening the trading of $wen for over 10mins and allowing retail buying at avg of 2000 usd per $wen….
Today lots of people will be REKT, lots of people already REKT.. pic.twitter.com/8gA1lrc7Wj
— HGE.ABC (@HGEABC) January 26, 2024
But token prices can fluctuate wildly immediately after an airdrop, and meme coins are famously volatile even outside of a post-airdrop window, so such chaos is to be expected. At least there’s a history of Solana meme coins (like those mentioned before) pumping in price many thousands of times over, so some WEN recipients may be holding on in the hopes of a similar jump.
🚨 LATEST: During the $WEN (@wenwencoin) launch, with a peak priority fee, 117,973 wallets were active on Solana at exact time, yet the Solana network performed exceptionally well, maintaining a flawless 100% uptime. pic.twitter.com/5Wmim4W7Na
— SolanaFloor | Powered by Step Finance (@SolanaFloor) January 26, 2024
The Solana network apparently held steady amid the immense demand for the drop, despite nearly 118,000 wallets attempting to connect at the same time, per data from Solana Floor.
However, the experience wasn’t completely devoid of technical hitches. Phantom wallet reported “performance issues” amid the early moments of the drop, and said it would aim to make sure next week’s JUP airdrop “goes smoothly.”
