Jupiter Exchange faces criticism over meme coin collaboration with alleged scammer

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Solana-based decentralized exchange Jupiter announced yesterday a new framework for fair meme coin launches and received backlash from the crypto community by announcing a partnership with Irene Zhao to launch the ASIANMOTHER token. On-chain sleuth ZachXBT accuses Zhao of acting against the benefit of investors of her previous projects, such as So-Col.

“Hilarious seeing Irene Zhao involved with a ‘solution’ for opaque allocations when she literally did exactly this with her project SOCOL by rugging all of the early investors by doing a secret deal with DWF where terms were not disclosed to them and community had zero knowledge about,” said ZachXBT answering Jupiter’s co-founder, identified as Meow, post.

The So-Col mentioned by ZachXBT is the Social Collectibles project founded by Zhao in 2022, which received up to $6.75 million in funding within a year. All the rounds consisted of investors buying the token SIMP.

In their $1.5 million funding round led by market maker DWF Labs in February 2023, Zhao allegedly acted behind the curtains and omitted details from the deal. The deal had a one-year cliff, only allowing the market maker to sell its tokens in February 2024. 

However, as reported by CoinDesk, on-chain data revealed that DWF Labs moved nearly 80% of their holdings to the exchange KuCoin before the SIMP token launch, when it doubled its price. Voices such as ZachXBT accused Zhao and DWF of acting to profit from retail buyers, while the So-Col team claimed that DWF Labs was helping with market making for the token.

Moreover, other X users commented on Meow’s post mentioning other alleged scams promoted by Zhao, such as IreneDAO. The project sold non-fungible tokens (NFT) with the promise to reshape the current state of the creator’s economy but has lost over 85% of its value since January 2022. 

Called CAT, which is short for “Certainty, Alignment, Transparency”, the framework announced by Meow envisions a new model for meme coin launches to prevent scams. The framework consists of actions such as tokens being airdropped to users, marking developer wallets with cliffs, and multi-round distributions to benefit early investors.

Meow answered the critics on Jupiter’s Discord server, claiming that the partnership intends to test the framework and a high-profile figure is needed. 

“I will clarify later that I am not endorsing, but they are one of the first users. Moving forward, we will not talk about the project anymore, but focus on the mechanics,” added Jupiter’s co-founder.

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