Cross-chain Protocol Wormhole Announces Airdrop for its W Token

TL;DR

• Wormhole announced an airdrop for its W token.

• 82% of the tokens will be initially locked and released over the span of four years.

Wormhole Announces Its Airdrop

The cross-chain protocol Wormhole announced the airdrop of its native token on Wednesday. In its blog post, Wormhole revealed that the token will use the ticker "W" and will have a maximum supply of 10 billion with an initial "circulating supply" of 1.8 billion

The team also revealed that the tokens would be divided amongst guardian nodes, community and launch, ecosystem and incubation, core contributors, strategic network participants and the foundation treasury.

Furthermore, 82% of the tokens will be initially locked and then released over the course of four years. Wormhole will use the native ERC-20 and SPL token formats.

This latest development comes roughly three months after Wormhole raised $225 million in a funding round. Despite not having a token, Wormhole was valued at $2.5 billion following that funding round. The funding round was led by Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital and Jump Trading, among others.

Wormhole said it is making this move thanks to the growing Web3 ecosystem. The team said,

“Today, Wormhole is the leading interoperability platform powering multichain applications and bridges at scale — the Web of Web3. The suite of open-source protocols is used by developers of over 200 applications and hundreds of thousands of users to move various types of data across over 30 blockchains. In total, the platform has handled over 950 million multichain messages for applications and teams like Uniswap, Circle, Lido, Synthetix, Pyth, and more.”

With time, Wormhole said it intends to progressively decentralize the protocol's governance to W holders.

“After the token generation and distribution events, on-chain governance will largely guide community programs and treasury-related activities. The goal of this governance launch is to empower and enable the Wormhole community to address these critical areas with the necessary resources and support," the team added.

According to Wormhole, its community members will get 17% of the total W token supply. Meanwhile, ecosystem and incubation take the largest share, with 31% of the total token supply.