Wormhole’s W airdrop to ‘acknowledge and reward’ dedicated users

The interoperability platform Wormhole shared insights about its upcoming airdrop on Wednesday. This event is meant to expand its ecosystem through the strategic distribution of its new native currency — W tokens.

While the post stops short of providing a specific date, it does outline that a hefty allocation of tokens will go towards supporting community engagement and protocol use. The announcement states that 617 million tokens, or 6% of the total supply, “has been allocated from the Community & Launch category in connection with this airdrop across 397,704 wallets following anti-sybil measures.”

“The airdrop included 500,000,000 W for on-chain activity for users who used Wormhole ecosystem applications across the 30+ Wormhole-connected blockchains, as well as approximately 117,305,000 W for community users, such as Wormhole Discord users, various NFT communities, Monad community and Pyth stakers,” the post continued.

The maximum supply of W will be 10 billion, though it’ll only circulate 1.8 billion initially.

Airdrops are utilized to reward users for being active in communities. Tokens or coins are generally dropped into user wallets as part of the event.

The cross-chain messaging platform added that it determined the eligibility for the airdrop based on each user’s length of engagement with the protocol, and “the cumulative volume of messages and transfers, and consistency of use throughout the protocol’s lifespan, as well as participation in applications within the ecosystem.”

Wednesday’s post added that the protocol plans to make W the governance token for its yet-to-launch Wormhole DAO.

“Over time, Wormhole plans 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,” a post from early February explained.

It added that it expects the DAO to take “more responsibility” for actions and listed token design and smart contract upgrades to a list of decisions.

Wormhole has a few open-source protocols: Wormhole messaging, Connect and SDK, Queries and Gateway. Messaging is a cross-chain messaging protocol, which has handled over a billion cross-chain messages for various teams.

“Wormhole was designed as a cross-chain token wrapping and swapping protocol between Solana and Ethereum. Since this original design and implementation, Wormhole has expanded to become a cross-chain messaging layer, which not only allows token wrapping and swapping between chains but also enables external protocols to build on top of it by leveraging Wormhole’s cross-chain state attestation model and messaging,” Blockworks Research wrote.

The cross-chain protocol has a $2.5 billion valuation as of November of last year after raising $225 million. Late last year, Wormhole’s Saeed Badreg and Anthony Ramirez split from Jump Crypto to run the protocol independently.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto and the markets.
Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
Lightspeed: All things Solana.
The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.