Gaming token and cross-chain platform Portal made its long-awaited debut early Thursday, rewarding airdrop farmers and Binance token stakers ahead of launching staking rewards and rolling out other features.

PORTAL, minted on Ethereum, is currently priced at $2.54 per token according to data from CoinGecko, with just over 167 million tokens currently on the market—nearly 17% of the total supply of 1 billion tokens. That puts the market cap at about $425 million as of this writing.

Newly launched tokens are famously volatile, and PORTAL is down significantly from the initial price of $3.36 upon listing with crypto exchange Binance. That 24% dip in less than 10 hours is sizable but also typical for new, heavily traded crypto tokens. Nearly $500 million worth of PORTAL has already been traded.

Not only is the Portal token now available to trade, but crypto users who participated in the project’s airdrop farming campaign on Twitter late last year can also claim their share of the initial airdrop. While some users on social media have griped about claiming issues and regional restrictions, others have shared that they received thousands of dollars’ worth of the gaming token.

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...

Other users sharing in the launch day buzz include Binance customers who staked tokens in reward pools to earn a share of 50 million PORTAL tokens allotted for the crypto exchange’s Launchpool campaign. More than $9 billion worth of crypto was staked at Wednesday’s peak, setting a new record for Binance’s launch platform.

What is Portal? It’s billed as a cross-chain platform that serves as a central hub for crypto and NFT games across multiple networks, giving gamers one place to access games, transact funds, interact with their owned assets, and more. It’s set to support games on Solana and Ethereum scaling network Polygon, among others.

The team behind Portal includes employees from the crypto startup SuperDuper—which is behind the Creepz NFT project on Ethereum—as well as video game industry veterans from Rockstar Games and Electronic Arts. Prominent Hollywood agency WME is representing the project.

The token is live after a months-long run-up: Now what?

Portal has tweeted about special token staking benefits launching in the coming days, letting players stake (or lock up) their tokens within the platform to gain various perks, such as “VIP access” to token and NFT sales, as well as early access to upcoming blockchain video games.

Portal will also hold more seasons of its engagement-driven “Crystal Dash” airdrop campaign to generate more user rewards. It will also launch nodes that users can presumably purchase to help support the network in exchange for incentives, akin to what the Xai gaming network on Ethereum scaler Arbitrum has done.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.