I’ve been sitting with this for a while, trying to wrap my head around what’s been happening with the broader shape of governance at Jupiter.
Let me start with something simple:
I don’t have an issue with team members buying $JUP on the open market with their own money. If anything, I respect that. That’s what most of us did. We believed in what was being built, we wanted to support it, and we staked our capital — and often our voices — behind that belief.
But here’s where the discomfort starts:
It’s not just about team members buying in. It’s about the massive allocations of free $JUP distributed to the team as part of their compensation — tokens granted alongside salaries and bonuses — being used to shape, steer, and ultimately decide the very governance that’s supposed to be “community-driven.”
And let’s not pretend this is hypothetical.
The team writes the proposals. The team votes on those proposals using staked allocations. And when people question the outcome — like in the case of the Meow 2030 vote, which pulled 220M $JUP from community reserves and shattered the original 50/50 split — the answer we get is always the same:
“The community has voted.”
But if core insiders are driving both the content of the vote and the majority of the votes themselves… is it the community that’s speaking? The team owns over 50% of all tokens. It seems they can now vote and get ASR rewards even on tokens that are still in the process of vesting… because they “care”? I feel like what they care about is fighting off the inflation that’s built into the value of $JUP. No surprise there. ASR is the only way to preserve some value in a JUP investment while waiting for all 7 billion tokens to hit the market and for the price to settle based on real demand and value.
Then came the recent “DAO Resolution,” which quietly redefined the DAO’s role as a kind of legislative wing for adoption and community. Not treasury. Not product. Not token strategy. That’s all retained by the team. So the DAO is now officially limited to marketing, guided and owned by a selected few individuals - because they care the most 
Now, we’re seeing proposals where newly formed teams like JUP & JUICE are requesting massive allocations — hundreds of thousands USDC in one-year commitments — with no clear checks on power, with extra alignment tokens of 87,000 $JUP per person, per year. Funny enough, when challenged on why they get so much $JUP, the answer was: “It’s better to have $JUP in the hands of people who care, instead of wealthy whales with deep pockets.”
To be honest, if I was one of those whales who invested too much of my own money, and I saw what was happening to my investment, I’d probably pull my money out of $JUP and let all those “more deserving” people have their token.
We keep calling this a decentralized experiment, but the actual outcomes are starting to resemble something much more familiar.
Yes, Jupuary brought in a wave of new users, and that was a win for the ecosystem. But this isn’t Bitcoin. And it’s not Dogecoin either — at least that had meme energy and no illusions. Without any real utility or value capture, we’re left holding something that drifts lower every quarter while being told to feel “aligned.”
It’s hard to feel aligned when the tokens you bought are down 50%… again, especially since there’s no real reason to hold any JUP. Now, it seems that votes can be swayed by a select few.
And if the people who believed the most and invested their own hard-earned money into the project are left feeling deceived—not because of price, but because of structure—then it won’t be the market that kills the vision. It’ll be the trust that quietly disappears, one wallet at a time
