Wormhole Token Economics and Airdrop Guidelines Overview

Author: Peng SUN, Foresight News

Launched in October 2020, suffering a $326 million hack in February 2022, and completing a $225 million financing in November 2023, Wormhole has survived for over three years, evolving from a criticized cross-chain bridge to a universal messaging protocol, becoming a super asset in the eyes of "digital beggars."

Today, Wormhole officially announced the airdrop distribution details for its native token W, with a total supply of 10 billion tokens, approximately 617 million W tokens (about 6.17% of the total supply) will be airdropped to around 400,000 wallets. So what are the W token economics and release rules? What are the airdrop criteria? Which users are eligible to claim the airdrop? What is the value of W?

1. Introduction to Wormhole

Wormhole is a universal messaging protocol launched in October 2020, initially incubated and supported by Jump Crypto, aimed at enabling developers to build native cross-chain applications covering multiple chains. It has evolved from a bi-directional cross-chain bridge focused on Ethereum and Solana to a universal messaging protocol supporting multiple chains and has been spun off from Jump Crypto.

For Wormhole, most people's impression is that the cross-chain bridge is insecure. Especially on February 3, 2022, Wormhole suffered a hack that resulted in a loss of 120,000 ETH (worth about $326 million at the time). However, this did not crush Wormhole; over the past two years, Wormhole has built a relatively complete product and ecosystem, with over 200 projects built on Wormhole. (Reference reading: "From Origin to Evolution, Understanding Wormhole in One Article")

In November 2023, Wormhole completed a $225 million financing with a valuation of $2.5 billion, with participation from Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, ParaFi, Dilectic, Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital, Jump Trading, and others.

2. Token Economics

W is a native ERC20 token and a native Solana SPL token (the SPL token standard was released by the Solana Foundation on the Solana network in January this year), with a total supply of 10 billion tokens and an initial circulating supply of 1.8 billion tokens, which will be distributed across Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base networks. The remaining 82% of tokens (8.2 billion) will be locked at the initial issuance and will be unlocked over four years.

Wormhole first announced its token economics on February 7, where 5.1% of the tokens (510 million) will be allocated 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 allocated to strategic network participants, and 23.3% (2.33 billion) will be allocated to the foundation treasury.

The token release schedule can be referenced in the following image:

3. Airdrop Distribution

Wormhole stated that after the anti-witch hunt, 397,704 wallets were selected from over 1 million independent wallets to receive airdrops of 617,305,000 W tokens in the "community and launch" category, accounting for 6.17% of the total supply.

Airdrop Criteria:

The snapshot time for this airdrop was at 07:59 Beijing time on February 7. The evaluation of the airdrop criteria referenced data from the past three years, distributing based on the duration of participation of 1 million independent wallets in the Wormhole protocol, the cumulative amount of cross-chain communication and transfer transactions, consistency of usage throughout the protocol's lifecycle, and participation in applications within the ecosystem.

Which users are eligible for the airdrop:

• 500 million tokens airdropped to on-chain users: Users who have used Wormhole ecosystem applications on over 30 blockchains connected to Wormhole; (see the image below for details)
• 117.305 million tokens airdropped: Wormhole Discord users, Bad Kids holders, DeGods holders, Mad Lads holders, y00ts holders, Monad community, and Pyth stakers.

According to community feedback, Mad Lads holders with the "W" badge can receive 16,000 W airdrop tokens, of which 3,200 W will be unlocked at TGE, and the remaining 12,800 W will be unlocked within a year. Yoots NFT holders can receive 2,000 W airdrop tokens.

How to check the airdrop

Users can check the W token airdrop through multiple portals.

First, Wormhole has launched an airdrop query portal eligibility checker, where users can check EVM, Solana, Sui, Aptos, Injective, Terra, Algorand, and Osmosis network addresses to claim airdrops, and it supports connecting Discord accounts to check community eligibility.

Airdrop query portal: http://airdrop.wormhole.com

Note: Airdrops for Sei, NEAR, Kujira, and Evmos will be sent to the wallets of the other party in the cross-chain transaction.

Secondly, Jupiter has partnered with Wormhole, allowing users to check and claim airdrops through the Jupiter LFG Claimpad.

Website: https://lfg.jup.ag/w

Thirdly, Phantom wallet will send push notifications and banners to eligible users, who can click to check and claim, or access the Wormhole official airdrop query portal in Phantom Explore.

4. What is the value of W?

As mentioned earlier, Wormhole completed a $225 million financing with a valuation of $2.5 billion, and its initial supply is 1.8 billion tokens, so the opening market price of W should be $1.38.

Currently, according to Whales Market data, the Pre-Market price of W is now 1.86 USDT/token.

In addition, news from February 29 indicates that according to Bybit, Wormhole (W) tokens will officially launch on March 20. Bybit has already listed W for pre-market trading, with the last transaction price at 2.18 USDT, and the current lowest buy order at 1.99 USDT.