Wormhole airdrop: The $W token guide (2024)

In crypto, bridges serve as connective tissue—and this is where connectivity platforms such as Wormhole come into play.

But why should you take a closer look at Wormhole, exactly?

Well, Wormhole recently announced its airdrop, and it's one of the biggest ever.

To get you up to speed, we’ll explore all the details of Wormhole’s airdrop and governance token: $W.

Overview

• Company: Wormhole
• Token ticker: $W
• Blockchain: Multichain
• Sector: Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
• Business Model: Cross-chain bridging
• Competitors:
  • Synapse
  • Stargate
  • deBridge

What does Wormhole do?

Wormhole is a connectivity platform that enables businesses to build either standalone crypto bridges or multi-chain applications.

While crypto bridges connect different blockchains through an independent, dedicated user interface, multichain applications allow you to transfer digital assets within an application itself—eliminating the need for dedicated crypto bridges.

The Wormhole platform is being developed by a decentralized set of teams such as Wormhole Foundation, Wormhole Labs, and xLabs, Superteam, Lurk (ZK engineering), and Zpoken (ZK engineering), among others.

Here are some of the crypto bridges built on top of Wormhole:

• Allbridge
• Mayan Swap
• Portal

Discover more projects from the Wormhole ecosystem.

What is the $W token?

$W is the governance token of the Wormhole platform, i.e., protocol.

As with all governance tokens, the aim of $W will be to allow token holders to guide and impact the protocol's direction via on-chain governance through a dedicated decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

More specifically, it's expected that the Wormhole DAO takes responsibility of these and other decisions and actions going forward:

• Adding and removing blockchain connections to Wormhole
• Upgrading smart contracts across Wormhole
• Adjusting fees across various products of Wormhole
• Expanding or adding new parties to the Guardian set
• Adjusting rate limits (a security feature)
• Token utility and design

Moreover, the token distribution of the $W token looks as follows:

• Max supply: 10,000,000,000
• Initial circulating supply: 1,800,000,000
• Token format: Native ERC20 and SPL (using Wormhole’s Native Token Transfer standard)
• Lock-up: 82% of $W are initially locked and such tokens will unlock over the course of four years per the Token Release Schedule.

How to qualify for the $W airdrop?

Wormhole's $W airdrop claim is live as of Wednesday, April 3rd, 2023.

To be eligible, you'll need to have used either dedicated crypto bridges—such as Portal—or multichain applications on the Wormhole platform.

When will the $W airdrop take place?

Wormhole confirmed its $W airdrop claim would go live at 11:30am UTC on Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024. It functions like other airdrop claims on Solana. Generally, token rewards aren’t sent directly to your wallet; You must go to a dedicated website to claim them.

Wormhole’s claim page is available and you can claim via our in-app banners.

⚠️ Beware: During airdrop season, scammers create imitation accounts to trick you into clicking phishing links and wallet drainers. Please exercise caution. Only click on, and visit, links from Wormhole’s official Twitter account, and do not respond to direct messages from unknown parties related to the $W airdrop—regardless if you’re on X (formerly known as Twitter), Discord, Telegram, or other platforms.

For more, read our Solana Airdrops guide.

How to trade $W with Phantom?

Note: You need to hold SOL in your Phantom wallet to complete this process.

If you’re not eligible for a possible $W airdrop, you can buy, sell, and trade $W tokens with Phantom.

After logging-in to your Phantom browser extension or mobile app, select a wallet that holds the tokens you’d like to trade. Next, click on the swap (arrow) icon at the bottom. In the swap widget, select the token pair you’d like to trade, review the order, then submit!

How to set up a Phantom wallet?

If you’d like a friendly multichain wallet for crypto, DeFi, and NFTs, try us out. We offer browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and Edge, as well as apps for iOS and Android.

First, download Phantom. Then, create a new wallet.

If you’d like to fund, or send funds to, your Phantom wallet, you can do so via the “Buy” button on your asset tab. We offer various funding options, such as MoonPay, PayPal, and Robinhood to make it easy for you to fund your wallet.

Once you do that, you're ready to go.

How to bridge tokens to Solana with Phantom?

If this is your first time using Solana, you might have most of your assets on other blockchains, such as Ethereum and Polygon. With our Cross-Chain Swapper, you can bridge tokens across Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon right in your Phantom wallet. Here’s how: