Cross-chain protocol Wormhole will launch its W governance token on Wednesday, with several cryptocurrency exchanges announcing plans to list the token shortly after the airdrop claim opens up to eligible users.
Wormhole previously announced details for the W token airdrop, with more than 400,000 total wallets eligible to participate in the claim. In total, 617.3 million W tokens have been allocated for the initial community and ecosystem airdrop, which will reward early users on Solana, Ethereum, and other chains, along with various crypto communities.
Late last week, Wormhole declared via a Twitter (aka X) post that April 3 will be “Wormhole Wednesday,” and that the W airdrop claim will begin at 11:30am UTC.
Now it appears that the token will be able to trade very soon thereafter, as multiple exchanges announced Monday that they plan to list the W token for spot trading at 12pm UTC on Wednesday. The list of exchanges now includes Binance, Kraken, Bitget, OKX, Backpack, and Gate.io so far, though further exchanges are likely to join the list.
W
Wormhole Wednesday
3-April-2024
11:30AM UTC pic.twitter.com/CjdmT1i8PE
— Wormhole (@wormhole) March 28, 2024
Given the size of the airdrop and prominence of the protocol in question, W is likely to be one of the year’s biggest token launches to date. The W token is launching as a native Solana SPL20 token, but will be expanded to support Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard once launched, representing the cross-chain nature of the protocol.
W was priced at $1.65 in pre-market trading on Monday via Whales Market, and Wormhole has said that 1.8 billion W tokens will be circulating at launch (out of 10 billion in total).
If that price holds on until the actual token launch on Wednesday, then the token would launch with a market cap of nearly $3 billion. That would make it the 50th-largest cryptocurrency, as of this writing, per data from CoinGecko.
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to add Binance, Kraken, and Backpack to the list of exchanges that will list the Wormhole token after the airdrop.