Cross-chain messaging protocol Wormhole (W) has debuted with its new token at a $3 billion market cap following its highly anticipated launch.
On Tuesday, the biggest crypto exchanges in the industry announced they were launching support for W, including Binance, OKX, Bitget, Backpack and WOO X.
With the token going live early on Wednesday, so did the airdrop, which distributed 617.3 million W tokens to over 400,000 eligible wallets.
Users with wallets on Sui (SUI), Solana (SOL), Aptos (APT), Injective (INJ), Osmosis (OSMO), Algorand (ALGO) and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chains and members of the Wormhole Discord group were potentially eligible for the airdrop.
W, a Solana-based coin, debuted at a $2.97 billion market cap with a circulating supply of 1.8 billion, and a $16 billion fully diluted valuation(FDV), according to crypto data aggregator CoinGecko.
Wormhole’s official X account said that after initially launching as a Solana token, Ethereum’s ERC-20 functionality will also be enabled.
“The token will be allocated across six main categories: guardian nodes, community and launch, core contributors, ecosystem and incubation, strategic network participants and the foundation treasury, with 82% initially locked and set to unlock over four years. The tokenomics structure is designed to support Wormhole’s long-term success, stability and progressive decentralization.
W will initially launch as a native Solana SPL token. ERC-20 functionality will be enabled post-launch through Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers (NTT), allowing seamless transfers across any Wormhole-connected network.”
At time of writing, W is trading at $1.26.
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