Bitcoin Gains 3%, Solana Up 6.9% Ahead of Jupiter Airdrops

Bitcoin gained 3% overnight as markets look ahead to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate announcement on Wednesday. The hope is that the U.S. Federal Reserve will leave interest rates unchanged, but that comments from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will hint at lowering interest rates later this year.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $43,439. That’s 11% higher than it was a week ago. Last week Bitcoin ran into some headwinds as Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) investors—recently unlocked as the fund was converted into a spot Bitcoin ETF—sold off shares. When the shares were sold, the issuer sold off large swaths of the BTC backing those shares and created a lot of downward pressure on Bitcoin’s price.

But European digital asset manager CoinShares has said there are signs that GBTC selling has slowed down. Even so, crypto funds lost $500 million worth of cash to withdrawals last week.

Meanwhile, SOL, the native token of the Solana ecosystem, started the day at $104.23—back above the $100 mark for the first time since January 18. All told, Solana has picked up 6.9% in the past day as trading volumes on liquidity aggregator and decentralized exchange Jupiter surge ahead of the airdrop of its JUP token. There’s nearly 1 million wallets eligible to claim the token starting on January 31.

The JUP community has been waiting for the DEX to set a date for its tokens airdrop for a long time. And now Jupiter, which has also rolled out its Jupiter Launchpad, is also preparing an airdrop of the Ovols meme coin.

The Ovols team hasn’t said exactly when the airdrop will begin, but hinted that it will take place this week.

The Solana community also just saw the conclusion of the WEN token airdrop on Monday. With $35 million worth of tokens left on the table, the WEN price took a wild ride. It plunged 23% after the airdrop concluded as the unclaimed tokens were burned.

At the time of writing, WEN is trading for $0.0001247—down 21% from yesterday.