Wormhole Airdrop on Ethereum and Solana Could Be Worth Nearly $3 Billion

According to pre-market trading data, cross-chain bridge protocol Wormhole is preparing for its upcoming multi-billion dollar W token airdrop.

On Monday, W was trading for 2.49 USDT in OTC trades recorded through Bybit — more than five times higher than a month ago in the perpetual futures market. At that time, Wormhole published the token economy and unlocking schedule for W, entailing a token generation event that would immediately release 1.1 billion tokens, with another 600 million tokens issued for community over the next few months.


Source: X

In total, this airdrop is worth $2.73 billion at current prices, potentially one of the largest airdrops in cryptocurrency history.

According to CoinGecko, the largest cryptocurrency airdrop to date was Uniswap's UNI token on September 16, 2020 — worth $6.43 billion. So, Wormhole's upcoming airdrop will help the project get a spot in the top 5.

Source: CoinGecko

Wormhole has not yet announced an official airdrop date and pre-market trading prices may fluctuate widely before then. There is also a strong possibility that the price drops sharply after the token is listed on exchanges, like what happened with Starknet's STRK airdrop last month.

The Wormhole and Starknet airdrops are similar in a number of ways: tokens for both protocols have a fully diluted supply of 10 billion tokens, and each token grants governance rights to holders to determine the future of the project according to decentralized way. The majority of W supply is also being reserved for the largest stakeholders, including 5.1% for guardian nodes, 12% for core contributors, and 11.6% for competitors. strategic networking.

Wormhole allows users to send messages and assets to 30 different blockchains, gaining popularity as a two-way bridge between the Ethereum and Solana networks. The project is valued at $2.5 billion after a $225 million funding round ending in November 2022.

Wormhole's website currently claims the protocol has processed more than $40 billion in transfers since its inception. According to DeFi Llama, Portal, the asset bridge protocol built on Wormhole, holds TVL worth $1.6 billion.


TVL of Portal | Source: DeFiLlama