Overview of Wormhole Token Economics and Airdrop Rules

Introduction

Launched in October 2020, it suffered a $326 million hacker attack in February 2022, and completed a $225 million financing in November 2023. From the much-criticized cross-chain bridge to the construction of a universal messaging protocol, Wormhole has lived for more than 3 years. After surviving a new round of bull market, he became a super rich project in the eyes of “electronic beggars”.

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

About Wormhole

Wormhole is a universal messaging protocol launched in October 2020. Originally incubated and supported by Jump Crypto, it was designed to enable developers to build native cross-chain applications covering multiple chains. It has now evolved from a focus on a bidirectional cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana to a general-purpose messaging protocol supporting multiple chains and has completed a split from Jump Crypto.

For Wormhole, most people have the impression that cross-chain bridges are unsafe. Especially on February 3, 2022, Wormhole was hacked and lost 120,000 ETH (worth approximately $326 million at the time). But this did not defeat Wormhole. In the past two years, Wormhole has built a relatively complete product and ecosystem, with more than 200 projects built on Wormhole. (Learn more: “From 0 t0 1: Overview of Wormhole”）

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

Tokenomics

W is the native ERC20 token and the native Solana SPL token (the Solana Foundation released a token extension of the SPL token standard on the Solana network in January this year), with a total supply of 10 billion and an initial circulation of 1.8 billion. Coins will be distributed on the 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 within 4 years.

On February 7th, Wormhole released its tokenomics for the first time, where 5.1% of the tokens (5.1 billion tokens) will be allocated to Guardian nodes, 17% (17 billion tokens) will be allocated to the community and launch, 31% (31 billion tokens) will be used for ecosystem and incubation, 12% (12 billion tokens) will be allocated to core contributors, 11.6% (11.6 billion tokens) will be allocated to strategic network participants, and 23.3% (23.3 billion tokens) will be allocated to the foundation vault.

Please refer to the figure below for the token release schedule:

Airdrop distribution

Wormhole said that after the anti-sybil attack, 397,704 wallets were screened from more than 1 million independent wallets to receive an airdrop of 617,305,000 W tokens in the “Community and Startup” category, accounting for 6.17% of the total supply.

Airdrop standards

The snapshot for this airdrop was taken at 07:59 on February 7th, Beijing time. The assessment criteria for the airdrop standards were based on data from the past three years, considering the duration of participation in the Wormhole protocol by 1 million unique wallets, the cumulative volume 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 airdrops:

• 500 million airdrops are allocated to on-chain users: users using Wormhole ecosystem applications on more than 30 Wormhole-connected blockchains; (see image below for details)
• 117.305 million airdrops allocated to: Wormhole Discord users, Bad Kids holders, DeGods holders, Mad Lads holders, y00ts holders, Monad community, and Pyth stakers.

According to community feedback, Mad Lads users who hold the “W” badge can receive 16,000 W airdrops, of which 3,200 W will be unlocked during TGE and the remaining 12,800 W will be unlocked within one year; Yoots NFT holders can receive 2,000 W Airdrops; Monad Discord status can get 8,000 airdrops; BadKids Holder can get 7,000 airdrops.

How to check airdrop

Users can inquire about W token airdrops through multiple portals.

First of all, Wormhole has launched the airdrop inquiry portal: eligibility checker, where users can separately query EVM, Solana, Sui, Aptos, Injective, Terra, Algorand, and Osmosis network addresses to claim airdrops. It supports connecting to Discord accounts to check whether they meet community qualifications.

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

Note: Sei, NEAR, Kujira and Evmos airdrops will be issued to the wallet of the other party in the cross-chain transaction.

Secondly, Jupiter has cooperated with Wormhole, and users can query and claim airdrops through Jupiter LFG’s Claimpad.

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

Third, Phantom Wallet will send push notifications and banners to users who are eligible for airdrops. Users can click to inquire and claim, or they can visit Wormhole’s official airdrop inquiry portal in Phantom Explore.

How much is W worth?

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

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

Additionally, as of February 29th, according to the Bybit website, the Wormhole (W) token is scheduled for official release on March 20th. Bybit has already listed W for pre-market trading, with the last traded price at 2.18 USDT, and the current lowest buy order at 1.99 USDT.

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1. This article originally titled “大毛至简！速览 Wormhole 代币经济学与空投细则” is reproduced from [Foresight News)]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Peng SU]. If you have any objection to the reprint, please contact Gate Learn team, the team will handle it as soon as possible.

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