JOE is the native token of Trader Joe, a decentralized exchange for the Avalanche blockchain. The exchange is not to be confused with Trader Joe’s, the U.S. supermarket chain – “Joe” is the bearded farmer who serves as the protocol’s mascot.

JOE began trading in August 2021 at $1.90. It rose to highs of $4.30 the following month, slumped briefly, then rose again in November 2021 to its all-time high of $5.02. The token crashed the following year, sinking as low as 27 cents on June 4, 2022.

JOE launched with an initial supply of 500 million. There were no pre-sales or private sales. The team kept 20%, the treasury 20% and potential strategic investors another 10%. The remaining 50% is reserved for liquidity providers. The protocol’s developers expect the total supply to be in circulation by the start of 2024. Once all tokens are in circulation, the protocol will not mint any more.

Trader Joe is a decentralized exchange on Avalanche, a layer 1 protocol that’s faster and cheaper than Ethereum, although not nearly as popular.

The Trader Joe protocol looks and operates just like Uniswap, Ethereum’s most popular decentralized exchange, or PancakeSwap, a Uniswap fork that does much the same thing on BNB Smart Chain.

All are examples of automated market makers – decentralized exchanges that facilitate token swaps by letting traders swap in and out of vast pools of reserves that other users have provided.

These liquidity pools automatically rebalance the prices of the tokens in the pools to accommodate for the constantly changing weight of tokens in a pool. The protocols reward those that provide tokens with more tokens – in Trader Joe’s case, with more JOE.

While Uniswap focuses squarely on token swaps, Trader Joe also offers yield farms, which reward stakers with JOE. Stakers can also opt to receive a share of the exchange’s revenue: 0.05% of all trades are paid in USDC to those who stake JOE in the sJOE staking pool.

Trader Joe also maintains a lending protocol called Banker Joe, and a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace called Joepegs.

Trader Joe was founded in June 2021 by two pseudonymous developers, 0xMurloc and Cryptofish. 0xMurloc claims to have been a senior product lead at Grab, a South-East Asian super-app that combines taxis, food delivery and digital payments. Cryptofish claims to be a U.S.-educated former Google employee.

While JOE is developed by a team of pseudonymous coders, JOE also functions as a governance token. Holders can vote on proposals to upgrade the network through the Snapshot voting system.

Trader Joe’s total value locked – a metric that describes all the crypto locked up in the protocol’s smart contract – rose from $23 million in August 2021 to highs of $2.59 billion in December. It crashed to about $1 billion in January 2022, but recovered to about $1.55 billion in April. When the crypto market collapsed in the middle of the year, Trader Joe’s TVL fell to about $300 million.

In September 2021, Trader Joe raised $5 million in a funding round sale led by Defiance Capital, GBV and Mechanism Capital. Stani Kulechov, the founder of DeFi lending protocol Aave, also invested.