How’s that going then?
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Good? Jupiter is one of the highest revenue generating protocols on Solana. It’s very early days, Solana is tiny in comparison to even a moderately successful web2 app/platform (some users have thousand of wallets, so user numbers are much much lower than what is commonly reported).
To grow from here Jupiter would need to onboard a lot more paying users. No more poor people looking for a wage, you need people who will be net spenders (like it is in the real world).
That means cutting back on content creator rewards (it’s becoming spam2earn).
And cutting back on this hodler stuff.
Proper products are valuable for user and don’t need incentives.
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Something to co sider ty for your work
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@Thementalist1 Interesting points being shared here…
— but in terms of practicality…just want to point out that right now authority over JUP matters isn’t in the hands of the community.
So it’s important to consider the context of the team’s history to make sure we have realistic expectations.
Curious…does anyone know what percentage of JUP community proposals have been adopted historically?
→ Has anyone done any research to find out?
It would be a helpful point of reference for discussing ideas.
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That’s an interesting observation about Solana’s actual active user base being much smaller than the wallet count suggests.
So since Solana, is tiny in comparison to web2 app/platforms…
I’m curious…how do you see Jupiter balancing the reality of a small crypto market with its current growth strategy.
Also, when you say “proper products don’t need incentives,” do you mean incentives in general are never needed, or are you specifically referring to the spam2earn incentives?
→ Do you think incentives are more harmful than helpful for Jupiter?
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Your point about the team hearing the message from the last airdrop makes me wonder how feedback actually influences airdrop allocation decisions.
Do you think the current system implements enough feedback from active participants, or is it mostly silent until results are visible after distribution?
I’m also curious how you’d measure “doing the things they say they want.”
Should it be weighted equally across buying, staking, and voting, or are some behaviors more critical for signaling value and commitment to the Jupiter ecosystem?
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Crypto sits in an interesting place in that it rarely has to face the monetisation problem that web2 apps do as every product is monetised from the very start.
For example, and I’m using very rough figures here, Phantom wallet has about 15M DAU (daily active users) and is considered (rightly) a very successful app. BeReal (now rebranded Voodoo) is a social media app in web2 with about 40M DAU and it’s considered a failing business.
But…
If you ran a bank or mortgage lender with a few 100 hundred thousand customers that’s likely a more profitable business than 99% of all apps today in crypto.
Is crypto closer to a mortgage lender business or a social app? It seems to change depending on which specific crypto app you’re talking about. I’d say, currently, Jupiter seems to pitch itself as the latter, but it’s current business model demands it’s a lot more like the former.
One thing is for sure: You can’t give away more value than you capture.
If you want a great example from history of how incentives alone cannot build a business look no further than GroupOn.
That was a business built almost entirely on giving away more value than it captured. In this case it outsourced that cost to the businesses that signed up to the platform but it spent years steadily burning through all the available business customers until the platform cratered due to lack of demand. A business would run a couple of GroupOn campaigns. Spend more money than simply running ads giving away discounted services/products, and then not see any meaningful increase in revenue. And so they’d leave to never return.
Whilst it was burning out it’s customers, GroupOn was continually touted as a success by nearly everyone (Google once offered to buy them for 5B!). Until the music stopped that is.
The same thing happened in the BNPL (buy now, pay later) boom. Zip, AfterPay, Klarna etc.. all gave away credit with no background checks and built businesses based on mounting piles of bad debt. They were very popular; if you couldn’t get any more credit cards or loans these guys would still give you credit: no questions asked. So they burnt through a heap of money in bad debt until, yet again, the music stopped.
Fun fact: Jack Dorsey’s Square bought AfterPay with near zero due diligence (which is nuts considering Square is literally a finance business who specializes in due diligence) for 29B and then proceeded to write that investment down to zero over the next couple of years. Proof that crypto bros can’t add up; especially the bitcoiner ones 
Now in crypto we see this sort of thing run at warp speed. LayerZero, Scroll, Zeta Markets, ZkSync, Polkadot, Berachain and the list just goes on and on and on and on, have all descended from billion dollar highs at speed due to the fact the business model that achieved PMF was giving away a lot more money than they earned in revenue.
It’s not that incentives are “bad” perse, it’s that they are marketing expense.
And they need to be assessed as such.
Has Jupiter seen value from the many many millions spent in token incentives so far as compared to what a similarly sized marketing budget would be expected to have achieved?
I’ve worked in user acquisition in both video games and gambling and I know the ROI I commonly see in crypto is miles worse than what both of those industries consider to be the absolute minimum required for a viable business.
Crypto is both a different beast to what has come before AND also no different to anywhere else (as these are not brand new humans that just showed up, they’re customers in other industries).
It’s a paradox in many ways. That’s what makes it interesting
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@andrewsaul Thanks so much for going into detail. You’ve made really good Web2 comparisons.
Like when you mentioned how in Web 3, every product is monetised from the very start…
It reminded me that I once did a bit of research on the Web 3 business fallacy.
In that, Web 3 gives the illusion that universal business rules, principles, standards, systems and structures don’t inherently apply.
—
→ So to that point, in comparing Jupiter to Groupon, LayerZero, ZkSync, AfterPay and others…are you indicating that Jupiter’s incentive practices may lead the business to experience a similar fate?
—
And as an added note, I recently made an interesting research discovery:
In crypto, incentives aren’t inherently valuable for business reasons…but they are inherently valuable for political ones.
Eg. If you look at the conversation around airdrops during the height of the launchpad wars.
[ When Pumpfun launched their token ]
You’ll see that doing an airdrop gave Jupiter a default narrative.
The narrative was…Pumpfun didn’t do an airdrop…but Bonk and Jupiter did.
Therefore…Bonk and Jupiter are better than Pumpfun…
—
So here is an important question I’d like you to consider as well.
→ What is the value of a narrative in a political context?
—
And in that regard, based on your professional experience/expertise…
→ Do you think that crypto’s lower ROI is because narrative promotion consequently diverts attention from structural inefficiencies?
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The best legacy is having distribution that Will favour the holders, investors and the real believer of Jupiter exchange.
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You make a very salient point: If token incentives aren’t marketing expense, then what are they?
It’s hard to define. Definitely Jupiter has spent a huge amount of money on something that looks a bunch like UA (user acquisition) and that hasn’t seen a lot of success by traditional metrics.
There’s something special about tokens. We all feel it. How else can a “worthless” JPEG be quite clearly valuable?
Or a “meaningless token of a dog with a hat” be worth objectively at least millions (if not billions)?
Being able to attract users and give them something that makes them a part of the product and services they use in a way that even traditional shares have never been able to is, for want of a better term, a type of magic.
It’s very imprecise magic though. And we’ve seen it fail nearly always in crypto so far. Nothing in crypto (even BTC) has been around long enough to say it has staying power as a new coordination model. Yet. I’m old enough to know this might be the last big shift in society I see in my lifetime. But I’m also old enough to know I’ve seen a lot more false dawns that true step changes (in all parts of life).
In all this it’s key to note I’m not bearish Jupiter or even on DAOs. I wouldn’t spend any time in this forums if I was.
I’m not like the Silicon VC/Wall Street crowd who seem to more and more look down on anything democratic (scary times…). All organisations live and die on how well they can attract and retain users. That’s called ‘the market’, the one the establishment are keen to quote when it comes to $1 = 1 vote, but seem to be completely against when it’s 1 person = 1 vote.
Unless we backslide into complete authoritarian rule in western democracies it’ll always be the case that the organisations that are most tuned into their user base will win.
I think Jupiter has achieved a commendable link with their users to date. But it often feels more like a fun club where people hang out (and some get paid for it) that what I think it should feel like more often than not: An organisation focused on performance.
As much as this is all very “new” the fundamentals of getting stuff done never change. I grew up on a farm, worked quite a while in hospitality/retail, and I’ve worked in technology for the last 15 years. All were very different in some ways, and entirely the same thing in many others.
Successful organisations all look the same.
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It’s true that incentivizing new users is key to growth. However, it’s also true that people are attracted to a project when they see existing users earning profits.
It’s a similar effect to seeing good staking performance with a high percentage; if it’s attractive, more people are encouraged to join.
In my opinion, if you only focus on new users, you run the risk of them not becoming familiar with the project. Incentives for existing users not only reward their loyalty but also turn them into a kind of “ambassador.” They are the ones who can attract more people and demonstrate the value of the product with their own positive experience.
I agree that incentives should be closely aligned with product usage, but I think current users shouldn’t be neglected. A balance between rewarding loyal users and attracting new ones may be the best strategy for sustainable growth.
Regards
Your opinion is appreciated catt
Hmm…I think we’re approaching a fundamental question here.
Because if tokens are a type of “magic” — and magic is illusionary…as it blurs the lines between perception and reality…
When tokens are used as a participatory incentive, isn’t this “magic” a psychological Illusion of value?
So then…isn’t this “imprecise magic” an existential threat?
→ Because what happens to humanity if participatory token incentives inherently make people psychologically fragile?
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After read this thread all I can say is yoursfaithfully.
Hey @Thementalist1 , I know you were initially replying to Andrew…but the ambassador aspect you mentioned made me a bit curious.
How do you imagine the ambassador role functioning?
→ Also…what metrics would you use to measure whether ambassadors are actually driving adoption?
And do you think it’s possible to differentiate between temporary adoption driven by incentives and long-term adaptation that isn’t dependent on incentivization?
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It’s all still a bit of an illusion though Isn’t it?
What actual problem does any of Jupiter solve? Swaps is important to Solana but not to this valuation.
The valuation is based, like all startups, on what hasn’t been built and the user adoption still to come.
Crypto is more affected by that sort of hype that pretty much anything else
I have a growing suspicion nearly most ambassador roles in crypto are being farmed by a small number of people.
It’s not hard to think there’s people who run a dozen or so discord/TG/X accounts each and then spend most of the day clicking between each fulfilling ambassador type roles at many projects across crypto
Once you have that in mind you can’t really unsee the fact ambassadors seem to be doing and saying the same things every where you go in crypto
The main purposes of jupnuary is to retain users and give incentives to real users to the platform. Jupiter shipped alot of product every day but still need incentives to encourage and attract new and exiting users.
ok…so if illusionary hype plays a monumental role in crypto valuations and Jupiter’s valuation is determined by future adoption as opposed to present utility.
Then isn’t the “future” the illusion itself?
And so wouldn’t the true danger then be about how token incentives become a psychological trap for the political narrative of the "future”
But then…wouldn’t the “future” that’s being constantly narrated…this illusion of value…subtly pave the way for centralized precedents?
Because what happens if Jupiter’s “commendable link with users” becomes less about “cultivating belief” and more about subtle conditioning — the kind that keeps people incentivized enough not to recognize…or confront the narrative performance?
Hmm…this definitely adds a new layer to what I was inquiring about before. [ Quote ]
Because if the “future” already functions as an illusionary justification for valuations, then what happens if the ambassadors themselves are not even “real” — but instead…recycled identities fulfilling the same role across ecosystems?
Doesn’t that effectively multiply the illusion — of not just of market consensus…but also community cohesion?
And in that case, isn’t the greater risk that Jupiter’s valuation narrative would be disproportionately shaped by incentivized promotion from a small subset of users?