The most underrated public good on Solana is getting a major upgrade.
Introducing: Jupiter Verify v4 - faster approvals, clearer guidelines, and the most effective system yet.
We’ve invested thousands of hours over the past 4 years into verifying tokens with 1 goal in mind — to keep traders safe from imposter tokens. For every “canonical” token, there are hundreds of tokens launched with the same ticker, hoping to steal away some liquidity from traders who didn’t know they were getting the wrong thing.
And of course, as the token landscape on Solana has evolved dramatically over time, so has our Verification system.
In v1, we manually merged pull requests in Github. Extremely painful.
In v2, we had a community-managed list via the Catdet Token Council. This was better, but suffered from information overload, council burnout, and a long backlog of tokens.
In v3, verification came only once a token had 5 smart likes and an 80 Organic Score. This worked pretty well and was difficult to game, but unfortunately out of reach for many legit tokens.
Throughout it all, our verification list has been given out (for free) to all Solana projects via our Token API. It’s a core part of our ethos to make Solana better and grow the pie, so we’re thrilled to see these APIs power the majority of experiences on Solana, including most of the major wallets and trading terminals.
Token Verification: It’s Fucking Hard
But with that adoption and massive growth comes a lot of pressure to “get it right”. And that is far from easy, and the explosion of tokens simply made it much harder.
The sheer volume of tokens is the first obstacle. There are roughly 50,000 new tokens created every day. It’s not always clear which tokens traders are really intending to trade.
Imagine Elon says “Platypus” and gets RT’d by Donald Trump. In short order, thousands of $PLATYPUS tokens will be launched. Which is the “canonical” token? The one that launched first? The one with the most holders? The one with the highest market cap? The one with the most onchain liquidity? The one with the strongest community?
To make the problem even harder, these metrics are all gameable and change rapidly. A token that is super hot one day might be half-dead by the time it comes across our desk.
And even when there is a clear canonical token to verify, and they aren’t gaming their metrics, it can still be hard to verify smoothly. New stablecoins, bridged tokens, and RWAs can all lack volume initially, while still being worthy of verification. It is very difficult to build a one-size-fits-all system, given these constraints.
Through Pain Comes Expertise
The good news is that when you spend 1000s of hours on a problem, you start to learn what really matters. Over the years, we’ve learned:
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to invent new hard-to-game metrics like Organic Score to determine the legitimacy of a token’s volume
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verification is fundamentally a community effort, requiring ample signal from people on the ground
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fully automated systems cannot work due to too many edge cases and outliers
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token creators need clarity, both on what the standards for verification are and how they can get verified
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verification is too important to the ecosystem to move slowly - it requires fast action and a fulltime team to support it
With these hard-won lessons, we’re proud to launch the latest evolution of our Verification System.
Introducing: Verify v4
For v4, we will be combining the greatest learnings from all past systems:
Clarity in Verification: we’re going back to form-based applications, with a clear explanation of the criteria we evaluate and a dedicated status table for token creators to monitor their submission in the queue.
Smarter Validation: we’re now going to look at the number of followers each token has on X. This will be a combination of general followers (so that anyone can contribute), along with a list of “Smart Followers”. These “Smart Followers” are a curated list of X accounts that we know to be credible signals of sentiment from real traders. This reduces the impact of astro-turfing with fake bot followers on X.
Express Lane: token verification will remain entirely free for token creators. But if you’re urgently trying to verify, we are introducing a brand new Express Lane. Burn 1,000 JUP, and we guarantee we will review your token within 24 hours. If you don’t pass the first time, we’ll automatically check again every day for 3 days
Most importantly, here are some guidelines, created from years and years of feedback.
The Guidelines
Rather than setting specific thresholds for each criteria we take into consideration, we’re going to look at a mixture of 6 criteria for each token that applies for verification. Here’s what we look at, and why:
Organic Score: An innovative metric we created specifically to help identify organic volume and holders for new tokens.
Social Validation: Anyone with a twitter account can help to validate a token by following their X page. Additionally, we’ll use a list of ~5,000 “Smart Followers” as a secondary signal to ensure the validation is not being botted.
Ticker Uniqueness: To avoid confusion among traders, we will check to see if the ticker is already being used by another token community. We will be regularly reviewing and removing tokens that no longer have community support as well.
Market Capitalization: Reflects the market sentiment on the value of the token.
Token Holders: Signals the token is well distributed and has an active community.
Onchain Liquidity: Helps ensure that the token is tradable and demonstrates LP interest in supporting the token.
Using this holistic approach, we’re hoping to be able to increase the Verification system’s effectiveness and better serve the Solana community by reducing the impact of imposter tokens.
Okay I know this is already very long but there’s two other important things to say.
First, Verification is not permanent. Starting a week from this rollout, we will start clearing out tokens with a low organic score and insufficient real volume. This sucks, but is a crucial step towards ensuring the Verification system stays dynamic.
Second, we Verify tokens at our own discretion. You do not HAVE to meet all the guidelines to be Verified, and different tokens may have different reasons for getting Verified. We will do our best to give clear guidance wherever possible, particularly as v4 gets more data and we continue to learn more.
**Ok that’s it. Go give it a spin yourself today over at jup [.] ag/verify!
And most importantly, give us your feedback!! This system will continuously evolve based on what works best for you all.**
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