Cross-chain bridge protocol Wormhole is gearing up for a multi-billion dollar airdrop of its upcoming W token, pre-market trading data suggests.
On Monday, W traded for 2.49 USDT in OTC trades recorded through Bybit— more than five times higher than it traded for one month ago in the perpetual futures market. At the time, Wormhole published a tokenomics and unlock schedule for W, which entailed a token generation event that would immediately release 1.1 billion tokens, with another 600 million tokens released to the community over the next several months.
The math adds up to an immediate airdrop worth $2.73 billion at current prices, potentially one of the largest airdrops in crypto history.
According to CoinGecko, the largest crypto airdrop so far was for Uniswap’s UNI token on September 16, 2020—a $6.43 billion event. Wormhole’s upcoming airdrop would place it firmly within the top five.
That said, Wormhole hasn’t announced an official airdrop date, and pre-market trading prices may fluctuate wildly before then. There’s also a strong chance the price could collapse dramatically after the token is listed on exchanges, as is what happened with Starknet’s STRK airdrop last month.
The Wormhole and Starknet airdrops are similar in several ways: tokens for both protocols have a fully diluted supply of 10 billion tokens, and each gives governance rights to its holders to determine the future of the project in a decentralized manner. Much of the W supply is also being reserved for its biggest stakeholders, including 5.1% for guardian nodes, 12% for core contributors, and 11.6% for strategic network partners.
Wormhole allows crypto users to send messages and assets between 30 different blockchains, having popularized as a two-way bridge between the Ethereum and Solana networks. It held a $2.5 billion valuation following a $225 million funding round that closed in November 2022.
Wormhole’s website currently claims that the protocol has processed over $35 billion in transfers since its inception. Portal, the asset bridging protocol built on Wormhole, holds TVL worth $1.6 billion, according to DeFi Llama.