Wormhole Launches Staking, but $W Plummets! The Reason? Expectations of a Monad Airdrop

The cross-chain interoperability protocol Wormhole released the tokenomics model for its governance token $W in early February this year. In March, it airdropped a large number of tokens to various protocol communities, NFTs, and eligible users, sparking heated discussions in the community.

Last Thursday (6th), the official Wormhole community announced a $W staking plan, allowing users to participate in governance through staking $W. However, for Wormhole, which had already conducted an airdrop, this staking plan seemed to lack sufficient appeal, especially given the low price of $W at that time.

Nevertheless, a post on the following day (7th) regarding interaction with the Monad public chain sparked community discussion and led to a surge in $W staking.

Expectations of a Monad Airdrop

In April, Monad Labs announced the completion of a $225 million financing round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital and Greenoaks, among others.

Notably, part of Wormhole's March airdrop was allocated to Monad's Discord community. At that time, anyone who obtained the "nads" role in the Monad Discord community received up to 8,000 $W tokens (worth about $10,000 at the opening price).

Simultaneously with the launch of the staking plan, Wormhole also introduced a limited-time task on the decentralized mission platform Galxe, which included a requirement to stake $W tokens. Users who completed the task received the "Steakorrr" role in the Discord community. Many believed this was one way to qualify for the Monad airdrop.

$W Price Reversal

Due to the expectations of a Monad airdrop, the Wormhole staking plan became extremely popular, driving the price of $W up from a low of $0.62 on the 6th to a high of $0.76, an increase of 22.5%.

However, since the limited-time task on Galxe only lasted until June 10th and Wormhole's staking plan did not lock the $W tokens, many users sold off their $W tokens after completing the task. As a result, the price of $W continued to plummet, reporting $0.5497 at the time of writing, down 11.8% in the past 24 hours.