Advertisement
Justin Sun Reportedly Receives 5.25M EIGEN Token from Airdrop as Trading Starts
- EIGEN, EigenLayer’s native token, started trading and quickly entered the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, peaking at US$4.53 and with an FDV of over US$6.6B.
- Tron founder Justin Sun received an US$8.75 million airdrop from EigenLayer and transferred all his EIGEN funds to HTX shortly after the token launched.
- The token is now available on major exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, OKX, Kraken, and decentralised exchanges like Uniswap v3.
EIGEN, the native token of the Ethereum-based restaking protocol, EigenLayer, has begun its trading journey. The coin made it to the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, reaching a peak of US$4.53 (AU$6.45).
Related: Analysts Say Market Ready for Explosion, Predict ‘Regime Shift’ Toward Altcoins
At press time, EIGEN is trading at $3.99 (AU$5.80), an increase of 7.40% from launch. Its market cap is hovering above US$742M (AU$1.07B), and its fully diluted valuation (FDV) is US$6.69B (AU$7.92B). The token is now available on major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, OKX, Kraken, and decentralised exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap v3.
Sun Gets In on The Action
It seems like Justin Sun, founder of the TRON network and main investor at HTX, got a nice share from the launch. According to blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence, Sun got a US$8.75M (AU$12.72M) airdrop from EigenLayer.
Spot On Chain revealed that Sun had moved all the EIGEN funds to HTX during the early hours of the Asian trading session. The transaction took place minutes after EIGEN debuted on all major exchanges.
Sun could be sitting on a profit of over US$22M (AU$31.9M).
All in all, EigenLayer seems to have had a successful debut day for its token, considering it has experienced a series of small failures in the past.
EigenLayer Gaining Ground
EigenLayer, founded in early 2021, quickly became one of 2024’s top decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols. At first, the idea of restaking was quite complex and confusing for most people in the crypto industry, but the underlying idea was to maximise yield by staking your already staked tokens on multiple other decentralised protocols (dApps) on Ethereum.
Related: ANZ Joins Chainlink, Singapore’s MAS Project Guardian for Tokenised Real-World Assets
It was the first Ethereum restaking protocol, and essentially works as middleware, enabling validators and protocols to trade pooled securities in an open market. EigenLayer has raised over US$170M (AU$245.8M) in funding and has attracted dozens of billions of dollars in total value locked (TVL), currently at $11B (AU$15.9B).
Author
José Oramas
José is a journalist and translator with a keen interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
