By George Ward
Last week, investment products exposed to the Solana (SOL) smart contract platform saw $3 million in inflows. On the other hand, crypto investment products had a total outflow of roughly $500 million during the same period.
GBTC-Induced Outflows
Per data from CoinShares’ Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly report, crypto investment products experienced cumulative outflows of $500 million this past week. The report added that these significant outflows followed Grayscale’s recent shift to a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Grayscale’s massive outflows of $2.23 billion significantly impacted the spot BTC ETF landscape. On the other hand, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF saw a $744 million positive inflow, while Fidelity’s fund saw a $643 million cumulative inflow. During the same period, there was a relatively small outflow of $38.8 million from Ethereum investment products.
Other Performance Metrics
Emerging data from the altcoins market reveals observable patterns in fund flows. Litecoin-related investment products saw a total outflow of $200,000, while investments in XRP and Cardano had a combined outflow of $400,000.
Meanwhile, Solana-related investment products enjoyed the highest inflows among altcoins with a $7.1 million cash injection. As this market activity continues, Bitcoin is poised to post its fifth straight month of gains.
Should this happen, it would be its longest streak since the spike fueled by stimulus measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the current uptrend continues, the asset will likely break its prior monthly gain record from October 2020 to March 2021, which preceded its all-time high of around $69,000 in November 2021.
However, it is worth noting that Bitcoin’s value fell by 21% in the first twelve days after spot Bitcoin ETFs were introduced in the United States in January 2024.
Pump And Dump Activities On Solana-Based Jupiter Airdrop
Meanwhile, Jupiter, a defunct Ethereum-based protocol founded in 2017 and operating under a similar name to a new token launched on the Solana network, had an unexpected surge in the value of its coins. Recall that the Solana Solana-based exchange aggregator, Jupiter, announced a $700 million airdrop.
Following the announcement, the price of its native token, JUP, skyrocketed 431%, peaking at $0.026 on January 31 before plummeting to its current value of $0.007 per current on-chain data.
Coincidentally, the value of the Ethereum-based JUP surged with the opening of claims for Jupiter’s $700 million airdrop.
The Jupiter Airdrop Complaints
According to Austin Federa, chief of strategy at the Solana Foundation, the Jupiter airdrop went off without a hitch, with the Solana network processing 2.5 million non-vote transactions within the first two and a half hours of the Jupiter claims activation. While the event ran smoothly at the network’s basic layer, several users reported problems with third-party apps such as Phantom Wallet and Solflare.
However, the issues these users experienced resulted from remote procedure call (RPC) nodes rather than inherent Solana network flaws. Despite these issues, 41% of eligible wallets have successfully claimed their JUP tokens, totaling 566 million JUP, since the event began on January 31 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time, according to Dune Analytics data.
A remarkable incident about this airdrop is that a seventeen-year-old crypto investor on X, known as notshort, claimed that he earned more than $1 million from this JUP airdrop. Meanwhile, these positive developments haven’t affected SOL’s price positively. At the time of writing, it is down 3.6% in the last 24 hours per Coingecko data.