Meteora Records All-Time High Alpha Vault Deposit in $SEND Launch
Traders deposited 720k SOL, valued at over $100M, to Meteora’s Alpha Vault protocol, hoping to ‘beat the bots’ in historic launch.
Hoping for a successful repeat of the Send It NFT collection’s dramatic trading history, traders in their thousands lined up to get their fair share of $SEND.
Attracting 720k SOL, the highly-anticipated launch exploded through its deposit cap to become the largest Meteora Alpha Vault launch in the protocol’s history.
$100M Deposited Ahead of $SEND Launch
In a bid to prevent sniper bots and inorganic traders from dominating the launch and capturing the lion’s share of token supply, the Send It team chose to leverage Meteora’s Alpha Vault launch platform.
Meteora’s Alpha Vault uses a unique subscription mechanism to ensure that all depositors get a fair token allocation in launches. Instead of buying tokens at a specific price in a first-come, first-served frenzy, buyers are allocated a percentage of the total number of available tokens based on their proportional share of all deposited funds.
Off the back of the Send It NFT collection's monumental trading activity, expectations ahead of the team’s token launch were sky-high. Eager traders quickly overwhelmed the conservative 999 SOL deposit cap, contributing 720k SOL in a launch that was 72,150% oversubscribed.
The Solana community responded positively to the milestone event, expressing excitement for the future of the Blinks Ecosystem.
However, while some participants were ecstatic about the launch, some reflected that the oversubscription method caters to large depositors.
With whales easily dominating the subscription pool and diluting allocations for smaller contributors, concerns have been raised about the model’s efficiency for other upcoming launches, like Sanctum’s $CLOUD.
Did Send It Beat the Bots?
While subscription-based allocation models are often a great way of avoiding sniper bot activity, it’s not always the case. Unfortunately, the $SEND launch fell victim to a handful of sharpshooters, with one sniper netting over $500k in the space of a few minutes.
As soon as the trading pool went live, this wallet swapped approximately $294.8K in exchange for 17.7M $SEND tokens for the price of roughly $0.016. Within five minutes, the bot sold off the majority of its holdings, securing over $545k in profits. Transacting over $1.1M in swaps, the bot accounts for 20.75% of $SEND trading volume.
Since peaking at a market cap of $169M, $SEND price has stabilized. Currently sitting at a market cap of around $18M, Alpha Vault claims will go live at approximately 15:30 UTC, July 15.
$SEND, Powering the Blinks Ecosystem
A community-led initiative, $SEND is designed to be a central rallying point for activity and innovation in the Solana Blinks ecosystem.
50% of the total supply has been allocated for early supporters, liquidity provision, and airdrops. Of the remaining supply, 15% has been set aside for core contributors and vested linearly over three years, while 35% has been allocated to the Send It treasury, and will be used to fund grants and initiatives that expand the blinks ecosystem.
While mercenary sniper bots are an unfortunate reality within the crypto space, the $SEND launch has been widely considered a resounding success. Across the Solana ecosystem, community members and network participants have responded enthusiastically to Blinks-based protocols and eagerly await future applications of the technology.
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