The encrypted barbarian Jupiter system: still owes the market an answer

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

On February 26, 2026, on-chain detective ZachXBT officially unveiled the truth behind the insider trading case at Axiom Exchange: a senior business developer abused backend permissions for ten months, illegally profiting over $400,000 by tracking KOL's private wallets for early positioning. This report not only concluded the case but also settled the high-stakes prediction betting on Polymarket, which had reached $40 million and held the entire market's breath.

However, the aftermath of the truth still lingers. Before the investigation was revealed, the market had unanimously pointed fingers at Meteora, with an implied probability as high as 43%. This was not baseless speculation; according to the crypto asset data platform RootData, Meteora is backed by a new Malaysian startup team centered around Meow and Ben Chow, who rose from the ruins of Mercurial Finance and built a full-stack matrix covering traffic entry, trading aggregation, and liquidity facilities within the Solana ecosystem.

From past controversies like the LIBRA scandal, MET airdrop scandal, to Upbit listing news, Meteora's development history has always lingered in the gray area of "information asymmetry arbitrage." Although ZachXBT ultimately targeted Axiom, the various doubts surrounding Meteora seem to have never received a true answer.

From Mercurial to the "Jupiter System," underlying relationships remain connected

The starting point can be traced back to 2021, when Meow and Ben Chow, under pseudonyms, founded Mercurial Finance on Solana, positioning it as a stablecoin asset management protocol on Solana, aiming to become the Solana version of Curve. During that liquidity-rich bull market cycle, Mercurial not only received support from Alameda Research but also completed an IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) on the FTX platform with SBF's personal endorsement, at one point capturing 10% of the TVL in the Solana ecosystem, making it quite prominent.

In 2022, the collapse of the FTX empire severely wounded Mercurial. However, the two founders did not choose to liquidate and exit but instead initiated a rebuilding path known as the "Phoenix Plan": splitting the business into two. Meow led Jupiter, aiming to solve Solana's liquidity fragmentation by defining optimal prices through routing algorithms; Ben Chow took the helm of Meteora, focusing on developing a dynamic liquidity market maker (DLMM) model with high capital efficiency. This split appeared to be a business focus but was, in fact, two independent brands forming a complementary flywheel, while remaining interconnected in shareholder structure and underlying logic.

On the traffic side, Jupiter adopted an aggressive strategy. According to the crypto asset data platform RootData, in January 2025, Jupiter successfully acquired Moonshot, effectively creating the shortest path for retail investors to purchase meme coins directly via Apple Pay or credit cards, flattening the consistently high barriers to entry in the crypto industry to consumer-level standards.

This layout successfully converted into actual monetization during the TRUMP token craze: as a large influx of retail traffic came through Moonshot, these buy orders precisely hit the initial liquidity established by the TRUMP team at Meteora. This closed loop of "capturing traffic at the front end and handling transactions at the back end" allowed Meteora to achieve a daily trading volume of $7.6 billion, accounting for 20% of the DEX trading share across the entire Solana chain.

At the same time, Jupiter's flagship DEX aggregator has evolved into the cornerstone of the Solana ecosystem. It is no longer limited to token exchanges but has introduced perpetual contracts, lending markets, prediction markets, and other continuously iterating products. Thus, Moonshot, Jupiter, and Meteora have constructed a fully closed-loop ecosystem from fiat deposits, front-end traffic, trading routing, multifunctional products, to automated market-making, completing the transformation from "project party" to "ecosystem controller."

Meteora's airdrop controversy and Upbit listing doubts

Although vertical monopolies bring efficiency, the accompanying information asymmetry and suspicions of power abuse have always loomed over the Jupiter system, particularly the airdrop distribution of Meteora (MET) and the Upbit listing controversy, raising doubts that this was not "community-first."

On October 23, 2025, Meteora welcomed its TGE. At that time, the total supply of tokens was 1 billion, with 48% (i.e., 480 million tokens) fully unlocked and entering circulation all at once. The team claimed this was intentional, aimed at achieving "real price discovery," but the market's response was extremely harsh, with MET plummeting from $0.90 to $0.51 within hours of opening, a single-day drop of over 55%.

According to on-chain data analysis in the early stages of the TGE, there were significant loopholes in the fairness of the airdrop distribution. The top four claiming addresses took approximately 45.94 million tokens, accounting for 28.5% of the total claimed amount. The behavior trajectories of these addresses were abnormal:

• Suspect Address 1 (3vAau…ae): Claimed 12.15 million MET (worth $6.31 million at the time). This address had previously claimed Mercurial (MER) airdrops and had sold over 30 million JUP to exchanges in the past; the same selling method has now shifted to MET.

• Addresses 2 and 3: These two addresses exhibited a high degree of synchronization, with their JUP transfer amounts repeatedly locked at the specific number of 2,622,632.41, and their activity times were completely consistent, likely belonging to a group controlled by the same force.

• Address 4: Claimed 10 million MET. Strangely, this address was created after the snapshot time and had never participated in any liquidity addition or staking activities. This "creation out of thin air" claim completely detached from the logic of the points mechanism.

If the airdrop distribution is a manifestation of power corruption and abuse, then the information leak regarding the exchange listing touches on the gray areas of the industry. On November 18, 2025, Meteora officially landed on Upbit, but even before the official announcement was made, insiders claimed to have known this information and profited through insider information leaks. Although there is no direct evidence pointing to the core teams of Jupiter or Meteora, combined with the MET airdrop controversy, it has already labeled the community with distrust.

Libra scandal: Ben Chow's resignation and the responsibility dilemma

Rewinding to February 2025, the LIBRA token, endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei, burst onto the scene, with a market cap soaring to $4.6 billion within hours, only to nearly go to zero, resulting in tens of thousands of investors losing over $280 million. Public opinion quickly pointed to the Meteora and Jupiter teams, accusing the team of providing "verified" labels and liquidity support for LIBRA, despite knowing the token launch involved scientist front-running and wash trading. Although the team insisted that verification was only to prevent fake coins and not an endorsement, the public clearly did not buy it.

Under public pressure, Ben Chow, a core leader of Meteora, announced his resignation and hired the law firm Fenwick & West to conduct an independent investigation. However, this move triggered a secondary crisis: Fenwick & West was deeply embroiled in collective lawsuits arising from the FTX collapse, with accusations that the firm had assisted SBF in blurring the lines between FTX and Alameda Research's funds.

The community's reaction was almost uniformly sarcastic, using a law firm entangled in its own lawsuits as an "independent investigator" for the ethical issues of former FTX projects. This "using controversy to handle controversy" approach made the public even more suspicious of whether the Jupiter system truly wanted to move towards transparency. Although Meow eventually stated under public pressure that he would reassess the choice of legal counsel, there was no subsequent follow-up.

The double-edged impact of vertical monopolies on the DeFi ecosystem

For the average user, vertical monopolies mean extreme efficiency. When you deposit through Moonshot, find routing through Jupiter, and finally complete transactions in Meteora's pools, the entire chain is optimized by the same team, minimizing transaction failure rates and experience degradation. Additionally, since the team controls both ends of traffic and liquidity, they can quickly support tokens with phenomenal potential like TRUMP, thereby maintaining Solana's heat and on-chain activity.

However, for the entire ecosystem, this high concentration and high risk are almost synonymous. When a team simultaneously controls front-end traffic, trading routing weight, lending markets, and liquidity pools, any security issue with their core private keys or legal disputes forcing core members to halt operations could severely impact liquidity in a short time.

More concerning is the issue of "innovation monopoly." Jupiter controls most of the order flow routing on Solana; new DEXs that do not integrate into Jupiter's ecosystem almost lose the basic conditions for acquiring traffic. This oligopolistic pattern at the routing level essentially constitutes an invisible market barrier—not determined by product quality but by proximity to Jupiter. Even more worryingly, Jupiter itself also participates in liquidity business through Meteora, creating a clear conflict of interest between "deciding the direction of traffic flow" and "being a beneficiary of that traffic."

Conclusion: The shadow of the Jupiter system and the unanswered questions in the market

ZachXBT ultimately exposed Axiom, but this does not mean that Meteora or the entire Jupiter system is innocent; it may simply indicate that the scope of ZachXBT's investigation did not cover that area, or that there is insufficient direct evidence.

The controversies surrounding Meteora have never been a black-and-white legal issue; they are a series of overlapping gray areas: the exploitation of information asymmetry, airdrop controversies, choices of legal counsel, and even the recurring excuse of "we only provide infrastructure" after each high-profile token collapse.

This startup team from Malaysia has indeed demonstrated its product execution capabilities to the market over the past three years, but they have also fully arbitraged every regulatory gray area with their business logic. Trust in the crypto industry has never been so easily earned; when the entry points of an ecosystem, transaction execution, and liquidity are controlled by the same interest community, the costs are ultimately borne by retail investors.

The betting game on Polymarket has ended, but the market has yet to obtain answers regarding Jupiter and Meteora.