Juno – The rise and the roadblock

For the uninitiated, Juno is an interoperable smart contract network in the Cosmos Ecosystem. It was created by a community driven initiative: various developers and validators from the cosmos ecosystem bootstrapped it, (this bit will be relevant once we get to the ‘roadblock/Risk’ part). The core principles for Juno was community focus and decentralization. To honor this, they had a genesis airdrop of $Juno tokens for Atom stakers. Being bootstrapped , they have no VCs holding Juno bags at low price levels. Also, $Juno is majorly traded on DEXs as they want to promote DeFi (so don’t go around asking wen Binance on there socials).

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The Rise: Since launch in October 2021, Juno experienced rapid creation in terms of DAPPs on its network (currently they boost of 50+ Dapps). Majority of these dapps, were doing Airdrops for Juno Stakers. Also, Juno staking has had enjoyed high APRs of 100%. All this allowed Juno token price to have a dream run from $7 to $45 becoming a top 60 crypto project by market cap in few months. And then …

The Roadblock: The Juno genesis drop was targeted to eliminate centralization, however there was an ‘Entity’ which operated as a custodian for investors having multiple wallets with client funds. Having multiple wallets allowed this Entity to bypass the whale cap and it received a significant portion of Juno genesis drop: currently \~10% of circulating supply (so much for decentralization goals). Technically custodians were left out from the genesis drop but this Entity was missed. The governance battle that followed to correct the wrong allocation divided the Juno & cosmos ecosystem. I refer to Cosmos as many core contributors of Juno, are active in Cosmos as developers and validators . Also, other Cosmos project founders and validators got involved in the debate, as what Juno was planning could have had implications across Cosmos and Crypto governance. All this drama (Validator planning to leave Juno and core team split FUD) has had an bearing on Juno price which has slid to $25

Ending Thoughts: Juno is a solid project. The genesis drop issue will get addressed and I think it will be a non issue in few months. The risk of Juno core team splitting might be there, but currently all seem to have come back together (even the one loved validator who was planning quit, stayed).

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