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Howdy!

Happy Monday from Lightspeed, where we’re one green candle away from exclusively covering Ripple.

Kidding (for now). Today, we’ve got controversy at Jupiter, pump.fun usage dipping, and “Enron” seemingly pivoting to crypto.

Competitors circle after Jupiter founder posts slur

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.

— Jack Kubinec

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Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem.

We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy.

We also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

Turns out people liked the pump.fun livestreams after all:

Trading volume on pump.fun has fallen from $3.3 billion the day it pressed pause on livestreams to $2.1 billion yesterday. 

$2.1 million is still a lot of money, and pump.fun has seemingly weathered every storm since launching earlier this year, so I wouldn’t dare say the platform’s user base is in jeopardy. 

But I’ll bet pump’s developers and investors are looking to turn the livestreams back on as soon as possible.

— Jack Kubinec

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem.

We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy.

We also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

December started off with a bang, as a new X account purporting to be the reincarnation of infamous energy market manipulator Enron promised a big comeback. 

Speculation is rampant that the newly launched “Enron” will create its own token, owing to some language about permissionless technology in an accompanying press release. 

Let’s nip this in the bud now: the new “Enron” is, in its own words, a performance.

Per the website’s terms of use:

“THE INFORMATION ON THE WEBSITE IS FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTED PARODY, REPRESENTS PERFORMANCE ART, AND IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.”

Will this stop anyone involved from launching a token? Perhaps not. In today’s market environment, anything is possible — and simply par for the course. 

Naturally, the “debut” caught fire on Crypto X/Twitter, for all the right and wrong reasons. Should you be skeptical? Let us count the ways: a website that’s less than a month old, a flashy, low-substance announcement video, and a career page chock full of images from Shutterstock and iStock. 

The X account went as far as to claim that one of the images was from an employee who “also has a successful modeling career which we support.” There was no accounting, however, for the other stock photos used on the website. Maybe the new Enron has hired a whole group of stock-photo models to serve as on its launch team?

— Michael McSweeney

A message from Ian Unsworth, co-founder of Kairos Research: