Portal Fever: Record $8.6 Billion Staked for Binance Rewards Ahead of Game Token Airdrop

The long-awaited Portal gaming token will launch next week, and the pent-up demand is enormous. Crypto exchange Binance began its Launchpool campaign on Thursday, letting customers stake other cryptocurrencies to earn PORTAL rewards, and it’s already breaking records after attracting several billions of dollars’ worth of funds.

More than $8.6 billion worth of Binance Coin (BNB) and the FDUSD stablecoin have been staked into Binance’s rewards pools for Portal, as of this writing. The Portal team hailed it as a record for any Launchpool campaign in a Thursday tweet, and a Binance representative confirmed to Decrypt’s GG that the claim appeared to be “correct” based on their data.

As of this writing, about $6.16 billion worth of BNB is being staked in the pools, along with $2.46 billion worth of FDUSD. The campaign will run until February 29, at which point Binance will list the Ethereum-based gaming token on its exchange.

Binance is offering up 50 million PORTAL tokens via the pools, which equals 5% of the total supply of 1 billion tokens. The pre-market trading price of Portal has climbed over the last couple days on Whales Market, doubling to approximately $2 per token. The bid price sat just above $1 on Wednesday. That would put the total estimated value of the Launchpool rewards at $100 million.

Portal is billed as a cross-chain gaming token and platform that’s designed to provide a single place for users to play and interact with blockchain games  across various chains.

The project—which includes multiple team members and advisors tied to SuperDuper, the startup behind the Creepz NFT project—plans to integrate chains such as Solana and Ethereum scaling network Polygon. Rockstar Games co-founder Jamie King is among the advisors working on the project.

Portal held an airdrop farming campaign in November and December that rewarded crypto users with points for tweeting and engaging with tweets, flooding Crypto Twitter with Portal content for weeks on end. The project has yet to reveal details of the actual token airdrop, but said that details will be revealed ahead of the token launch next week.

BNB hit a 21-month high price above $386 on Thursday amid the Portal staking frenzy. Crypto intelligence firm Arkham reported Thursday that BNB holders had sent more than $400 million worth of the token to Binance’s pools to take advantage of the Portal rewards push.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to change the Whales Market statistic from the "average bids" price to the lowest offer available at the time of writing. As a result, using this metric, the pre-market price of PORTAL had actually grown from Wednesday to Friday, rather than fallen.