Jupiter DAO Suspends Governance: Staking Rewards to Continue

For all attempts to inspire community involvement, Jupiter’s ambitious DAO experiment has been put on the back burner.

Following months of criticism from $JUP holders, crypto’s largest DAO has made the executive decision to pause all governance votes until the end of 2025.

Jupiter COO/Cat Herder Kash Dhanda argues that the suspension will enable the team to focus on building the superapp's core products during a “critical inflection point” for crypto adoption.

Meanwhile, Jupiter has claimed ownership of an experimental token launchpad, several days after deploying a test token.

Jupiter Suspends Governance Votes Until 2026

On June 19, Dhanda announced that Jupiter DAO would be pausing all governance votes until the end of the year. Citing community fatigue and the fragmentation of attention and resources, the Jupiter core team will focus entirely on developing its mainline products.

With crypto finally getting a seat at the TradFi table and institutional demand at all-time highs, Dhanda argues that “the window to define the future of DeFi is open, but it won’t stay open for long.”

Despite suspending DAO votes until 2026, all existing Jupiter working groups will retain access to pre-approved funding. $JUP stakers will continue earning ASR every quarter, based on time-weighted stake.

DAO Majority Supports Decision

For the bulk of the Jupiter DAO, the suspension of further governance comes as an immense relief. Token holders have expressed their frustration towards working group budgeting proposals all year, claiming they distract the core team from execution and development while simultaneously enabling opportunists to drain the treasury.

Tensions reached a tipping point earlier this week, when Jupiter co-founder Meow complained that Jupiter’s working groups don’t have an active performance review. Jupiter’s frontman suggested that DAO-funded groups need to be doing more to actively solicit feedback from the community.

Given the animosity towards Jupiter’s governance, community members are unsurprisingly pleased with the suspension of votes. 𝕏 polls from Jup DAO members suggest the majority of token holders support the core team’s decision.

However, as with all discourse surrounding governance, not everyone sees things the same way. Several Jupiter community members have highlighted that if the core team retains full control over protocol governance, then it was never truly decentralized in the first place.

“We’re genuinely confused out here; it’s hard not to see this as sidelining our voice at a time when product growth and community development should involve us more, not less… We need real clarity on how you plan to keep us in the loop and ensure our input isn’t just an afterthought during this long freeze.” - Connor, Jupiter DAO Member

Jupiter’s core team will use the time granted by the pause to reevaluate the DAO’s governance model and return with an improved structure to align the protocol with its supporters.

Jupiter Claims Ownership of New Launchpad

Behind the scenes, Jupiter’s core team has unveiled Jupiter Studio, a new launchpad for creator tokens. Throwing down a fresh gauntlet into Solana’s fierce launchpad wars, Jupiter Studio offers creators customizable bonding curves, vesting terms, and LP fees.

Before claiming the launchpad as a Jupiter product, the platform launched a test memecoin, $VIBE, on June 16th. 

Onchain sleuths quickly connected $VIBE to a Jupiter team member’s wallet, while also remarking that the token was instantly verified on Jupiter’s main aggregator. Solana’s memecoin trench-dwellers wasted no time piling into the new coin, pushing its valuation to an all-time high of $9M. 

Seeking clarity, traders swarmed the Jupiter Discord to question the launchpad and the token’s legitimacy. 

Discord moderators asserted that $VIBE and the associated launchpad had nothing to do with Jupiter. Moderators were disproven days later on June 19, when core team member mei confirmed the launchpad was indeed a Jupiter product.

At press time, $VIBE is exchanging hands at an FDV of 5.8M, with 50% of the supply locked in the liquidity pool for one year.

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