From cointelegraph by Tom Mitchelhill

Solana ecosystem users are set to benefit from at least two major airdrops in January, which will see hundreds of millions in tokens handed to eligible users. 

The first airdrop slated for the New Year will come from the Solana layer-2 gaming network Sonic, which is set to airdrop 7% of the supply of its native SONIC token to users on Jan. 7. 

According to a Jan. 1 post on X, Sonic wrote that just 15% of the total supply of 2.4 billion SONIC tokens would be live for trading on the day of the airdrop. 

About 8% of the token would be pre-allocated to “early supporters,” while 7% would be airdropped to initial claimers. Notably, the only way to qualify for the SONIC airdrop was to be onboarded through the social media platform TikTok.

Like Telegram mini-games, Sonic built its SonicX game natively inside TikTok and has opted to reward those users directly. 

Sonic raised $12 million in a Series A funding round in June 2024. Additionally, the protocol partnered with Solana staking layer Solayer and topped $50 million worth of staked SOL in its delegation pool in November. 

Jupiter prepares for $625M “JUPuary” airdrop 

Jupiter, a decentralized exchange aggregator on Solana, is getting ready to airdrop about $625 million worth of its native JUP (JUP) tokens to eligible users sometime in January. 

In a Dec. 27 post to X, Jupiter Uplink shared that 700 million JUP tokens — worth $625 million at current prices — would be airdropped to users. 

Related: Solana adds $1B worth of stablecoins in December

Jupiter shared that a total of around 2.3 million wallet addresses would be eligible for the “JUPuary” airdrop, with a series of different qualifying actions that would see users earn larger amounts of JUP. 

Jupiter opted to distribute tokens through a tiered rollout for users who accrued high volumes of trading activity on the exchange. Any user who accumulated more than $800 worth of trading volume will receive 50 JUP, while users who racked up $14 million in trading volume will receive 20,000 JUP tokens. 

Additionally, Jupiter users who interacted with any of the Perps, dollar-cost averaging (DCA) or limit order features will also receive additional JUP tokens.

The Jupiter and Sonic airdrops will mark the second and third airdrops on Solana in the last month, with the Pudgy Penguins airdrop handing out over $1 billion in PENGU tokens to eligible users on Solana — mostly Pudgy Penguins holders.