Wormhole token slides 24% before recovering slightly following airdrop

The cross-chain messaging protocol Wormhole opened airdrop claims for its governance token, named W, Wednesday morning.

Some recipients celebrated so-called Wormhole Wednesday by cashing out on their allotment, leading W’s price to fall 24% within a few hours of the token beginning to trade, according to CoinGecko. The token would quickly recover though, settling at a smaller dip from its opening price by press time.

6.78% of W’s supply was set aside for the airdrop, an allocation worth roughly $855 million at current prices.

Wormhole is a multi-chain protocol, but it initially launched W as an SPL token on Solana. The protocol facilitates the movement of assets and data between blockchains.

The project cited the blockchain’s “scalability, low transaction costs, and rapid processing times.” It will soon expand to Ethereum and its layer-2s.

It was not immediately clear how much W had been claimed Wednesday morning, but Wormhole’s blockchain explorer shows a swift uptick in transactions following the airdrop.

W is meant to serve as a Wormhole governance token, a common use case for community tokens. The forthcoming Wormhole DAO will be a multi-chain DAO operating on Solana, Ethereum and layer-2s.

Interestingly, W’s post-launch dump wasn’t the universal trend among airdrops this week. The yield-bearing stablecoin project Ethena saw its ENA governance token double in price after being listed on exchanges Tuesday.

W and ENA launched with similarly-gaudy fully-diluted valuations. Wormhole’s community will hope that W can follow the lead of Ethena’s community token, though the early returns aren’t promising.

“Notice how quiet the Wormhole airdrop is compared to the Ethena airdrop. The entire timeline isn’t talking about it,” a developer at Delegate wrote on X.

Back in November, Wormhole announced it had reached a $2.5 billion valuation in a $225 million funding round.

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