Title: A Brief Overview of Wormhole Token Economics and Airdrop Rules
Article:
Authored by: Peng SUN, Foresight News
Launched in October 2020, hit by a $326 million hacker attack in February 2022, and completed a $225 million financing in November 2023, Wormhole has survived for over three years. From a criticized cross-chain bridge to the construction of a universal messaging protocol, Wormhole has become a “super big hair” in the eyes of “electronic beggars” in the new bull market.
Today, Wormhole officially announced the details of its native token W airdrop distribution. With a total supply of 10 billion, approximately 617 million W tokens (about 6.17% of the total supply) will be airdropped to around 400,000 wallets. So, what are the token economics and release rules of W? What are the airdrop criteria? Which users are eligible for the airdrop? And what is the value of W?
Table of Contents:
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1. Introduction to Wormhole
2. Token Economics
3. Airdrop Distribution
Airdrop Criteria
Eligible Users for Airdrop
How to Check Airdrop
4. The Value of W
Wormhole is a universal messaging protocol launched in October 2020. Initially incubated and supported by Jump Crypto, it aims to enable developers to build native cross-chain applications that cover multiple chains. It has now evolved from a focus on Ethereum and Solana’s bidirectional cross-chain bridge to a universal messaging protocol that supports multiple chains. It has completed its split from Jump Crypto.
For most people, Wormhole is known for its insecure cross-chain bridge. Especially on February 3, 2022, when Wormhole suffered a hacker attack and lost 1.2 million ETH (valued at approximately $326 million at the time). However, this did not defeat Wormhole. In the past two years, Wormhole has built a relatively complete product and ecosystem, with over 200 projects built on Wormhole. (Reference: “From Origin to Evolution: Understanding the Panorama of Wormhole”)
In November 2023, Wormhole completed a $225 million financing with a valuation of $2.5 billion. Participants in the financing included Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, ParaFi, Dilectic, Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital, and Jump Trading.
W is the native ERC20 token and native Solana SPL token (Solana Foundation released the SPL token standard extension on the Solana network in January this year). The total supply is 10 billion, with an initial circulation of 1.8 billion. It will be distributed on Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base networks. The remaining 82% of tokens (8.2 billion) will be locked at the initial issuance and unlocked within four years.
On February 7, Wormhole released its token economics. Among them, 5.1% of tokens (510 million) will be distributed to guardian nodes, 17% (1.7 billion) will be allocated to community and launch, 31% (3.1 billion) will be used for ecosystem and incubation, 12% (1.2 billion) will be allocated to core contributors, 11.6% (1.16 billion) will be distributed to strategic network participants, and 23.3% (2.33 billion) will be allocated to the foundation treasury.
According to Wormhole, after excluding duplicates, a total of 397,704 wallets were selected from over 1 million independent wallets to receive the airdrop of 617,305,000 W tokens in the “community and launch” category, accounting for 6.17% of the total supply. The snapshot for this airdrop was taken at 07:59 on February 7, Beijing time. The airdrop criteria were evaluated based on nearly three years of data, including the duration of wallet participation in the Wormhole protocol, accumulated cross-chain communication and transfer transaction volumes, consistency throughout the protocol lifecycle, and participation in ecosystem applications.
500 million tokens will be airdropped to on-chain users who use Wormhole ecosystem applications on over 30 blockchains connected to Wormhole (see details in the figure).
1.17305 billion tokens will be distributed to Wormhole Discord users, Bad Kids holders, DeGods holders, Mad Lads holders, y00ts holders, Monad community, and Pyth stakers.
Based on community feedback, Mad Lads users with the “W” badge will receive an airdrop of 16,000 W tokens, with 3,200 W tokens unlocking at TGE and the remaining 12,800 W tokens unlocking within one year. Yoots NFT holders will receive an airdrop of 2,000 tokens, Monad Discord members will receive 8,000 tokens, and BadKids holders will receive 7,000 tokens.
Users can query and claim W token airdrops through multiple portal websites. Firstly, Wormhole has launched an airdrop query portal called “eligibility checker,” where users can check and claim airdrops on EVM, Solana, Sui, Aptos, Injective, Terra, Algorand, Osmosis networks, and also supports connecting Discord accounts to check for community eligibility.
Airdrop query portal: http://airdrop.wormhole.com
Note: Sei, NEAR, Kujira, and Evmos airdrops will be sent to the wallets of the counterparty in cross-chain transactions.
Secondly, Jupiter has partnered with Wormhole, and users can query and claim airdrops through Jupiter LFG’s Claimpad.
URL: https://lfg.jup.ag/w
Thirdly, Phantom wallet will send push notifications and banners to eligible users for airdrops. Users can click on the notification to query and claim, or access the official Wormhole airdrop query portal in Phantom Explore.
As mentioned earlier, Wormhole completed a $225 million financing with a valuation of $2.5 billion, and its initial supply was 1.8 billion. Therefore, the opening price of W should be $1.38.
Currently, according to Whales Market data, the pre-market price of W is $1.86 USDT per token.
In addition, news on February 29 revealed that Wormhole (W) tokens will be officially released on March 20. Bybit has already listed W for pre-market trading, with the last transaction price at $2.18 USDT. The current lowest buying price is $1.99 USDT.
(This article is authorized to be reproduced from “Foresight News”.)
