Pyth Airdrop Puts $77 Million in the Wallets of Crypto Users

DeFi oracles network Pyth enjoyed a strong debut for its much-anticipated token airdrop on Monday, quickly nabbing an initial market capitalization of $765 million for its Solana-based PYTH token. However, that figure settled down to roughly $457 million at writing, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Upon PYTH’s launch this morning, the token began trading at $0.53, only to fall to $0.28 minutes later. It has since leveled out to just above $0.30 as of this writing. The token has seen over $87 million in trading volume since it launched.

PYTH’s initial circulating supply of 1.5 billion tokens will steadily grow, according to the token’s roadmap, to a total supply of 10 billion tokens. Incremental increases in the token supply are set to begin in six months, and will take place over the following three years.

Pyth Network offered up about 250 million tokens through the airdrop to reward early users, effectively putting over $77 million worth of the crypto token in the pockets of users, as of this writing.

Of the roughly 90,000 wallets currently eligible to receive tokens through the Pyth airdrop, just over 35,000 have already claimed their allotment, according to on-chain data compiled by Dune. Candidates for the airdrop, including users of decentralized apps (dapps) across 27 blockchains that rely on Pyth network data, holders of Pyth NFTs, and Pyth Discord community administrators, will have until February 18 to claim their free tokens.  

Backpack, a new crypto exchange led by FTX’s former general counsel and created by the makers of the homonymous Solana-based NFT app, also announced Monday that it would airdrop PYTH tokens to every one of its new users who staked SOL within the last two days.

The exchange has already airdropped PYTH to 74,000 wallets through this program, according to Tristan Yver, Backpack’s co-founder. Holders of NFTs from Backpack’s Mad Lads collection on Solana are also eligible for token distribution. Decrypt reached out to Backpack co-founder Armani Ferrante for more details about the source of the tokens, but did not immediately hear back.

Oracle networks like Pyth connect blockchains with data sources from the off-chain world, allowing DeFi smart contracts to execute based on inputs and outputs from real-world events and data. Pyth is currently the fourth-largest such network by total value secured, with a market share of 4.75%, according to DeFiLlama. That figure represents a slight decrease from last week, when the network claimed 4.83% of all oracle business.

Edited by Andrew Hayward