Solana DeFi platform Jito will begin its anticipated airdrop Thursday, and Coinbase—America's biggest cryptocurrency exhange—said that it will list the JTO token right away.

In a Wednesday announcement, Coinbase said that JTO trading will begin on or after 11am Eastern Time on Thursday, subject to liquidity conditions. 

JTO is the governance token of Jito, a project which runs on the Solana blockchain. It is the second-largest decentralized finance (DeFi) project on Solana, according to DeFi Llama data, and allows people to earn a return with their tokens by pledging them to the network. 

And its airdrop claiming starts tomorrow. Airdrops are a common way for new crypto projects to try and attract users: they simply give out free tokens or coins to users with the hope of growing their community and boosting the price of the protocol’s asset. 

Coinbase’s announcement comes at a time when a number of other Solana-based projects have announced airdrops. The exchange’s CEO Brian Armstrong also recently told Decrypt that the platform planned to integrate Solana. 

Solana is the blockchain behind the sixth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, SOL. There has been a lot of hype around Solana this year due to increased interest from investors and mainstream firms such as Visa and Shopify. 

There was talk that the blockchain might suffer following the collapse of criminally mismanaged crypto exchange FTX—which heavily invested in the Solana ecosystem—but it gained a resurgence last month because it is deemed to be fast, cheap and easy for developers to build applications on.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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