Wormhole's Solana Token Plunges 50% After Massive Airdrop

By Sander Lutz

Barely a week after its massive debut airdrop, cross-chain protocol Wormhole’s native W token has tumbled off a cliff—plummeting over 50% in value. 

At writing, the price of W has fallen to $0.82. That’s down a stark 50.6% since the token launched last week at $1.66. 

Most of that value has been shed steadily over the last week. W is down only 4.5% in the last 24 hours. 

Announced early last month, Wormhole’s airdrop of a native governance token generated much excitement in DeFi circles, particularly due to the breadth of the offering: as Wormhole allows users to bridge tokens across blockchains, wallets across over 30 networks—including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Sui—were eligible to collect free W tokens. 

All in all, more than 400,000 unique wallets could have participated in the airdrop, including users of Solana wallet and exchange Backpack and DeFi aggregator Jupiter; holders of NFTs including Mad Lads, yoots, and DeGods; and active participants in the Wormhole Discord. 

When the W token finally launched last week—as a native Solana token that was bridged to other blockchain ecosystems using Wormhole’s own tech—it was met with immediate demand. In the first minutes of the airdrop, more than 37,000 wallets claimed W, according to Flipside, and the token briefly eclipsed a market capitalization of $3 billion. 

At writing, roughly 140,000 wallets have claimed W. 

The token’s early momentum is evaporating, however. W currently has a market cap of $1.47 billion. 

Only 1.8 billion W tokens are currently in initial circulation, but according to the coin’s roadmap, the token supply will ultimately expand to 10 billion.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

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