The most valuable SUI Airdrop? WAL Token comprehensive value forecast

Will the editor who is going to launch Mainnet in March, benchmarking FIL + TIA, and getting the WAL Airdrop, get rich?

Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News

WAL Token Airdrop

Recently, Sui developer Mysten Labs’ new protocol - the decentralized storage and data availability protocol Walrus distributed tokens in the form of NFT through an Airdrop. Eligible community members’ Sui wallet addresses have received a soul-bound (non-transferable) Walrus Airdrop NFT, which displays the quantity of WAL tokens, allowing them to claim the corresponding amount of WAL tokens when the Mainnet goes live in March.

This Airdrop distributed 4% of the total supply of 50 billion WAL, while another 6% is reserved for future community incentives and ecosystem distribution. For an introduction to the Walrus protocol, it is recommended to read the author’s article from September last year: Interpreting Walrus, Sui’s new decentralized storage solution. Produced by the Sui development team, it features an independent PoS chain, a new governance token WAL, and potential Airdrop opportunities.

According to data statistics, about 120,000 Sui addresses received the WAL Airdrop, with 80% of the addresses having a quantity of 1,000 or less, and 142 addresses having more than 80,000 tokens. Only one address received the maximum Airdrop of 100,000 tokens. The eligibility requirements for the Airdrop involve interaction with the Walrus testnet, native staking of SUI tokens, active DeFi on the Sui chain, NFT users, Galaxy event users, and the Meme contest hosted by Walrus, etc.

My Sui chain main address received more than 90,000 tokens, ranking in the top 100 among all Sui addresses, barely maintaining the image of ‘deeply participating in the Sui ecosystem’.

WAL Token Amount Address Distribution Statistics

Market Cap Comparison: From FIL, AR to Mysten Labs Ecosystem

In the storage protocol space, Filecoin (FIL) and Arweave (AR) have impressive market values. FIL has built a massive ecosystem for data storage and retrieval, while AR has been favored by the market for its permanent storage solution.

Currently, the market value of FIL is about 20 billion US dollars, the fully diluted valuation (FDV) is about 60 billion US dollars, while the market value and FDV of AR are both about 600 million US dollars. If compared to the fully diluted valuation of FIL, the price of WAL will have the opportunity to exceed 1 US dollar; while if compared to AR, the price of WAL will be around 0.1 US dollar. There is a significant difference between the two, which project is closer to the potential price of Walrus?

Although Walrus is just getting started, with strong support from Sui developer Mysten Labs, we can look for clues from the token performance of other projects at Mysten Labs.

NS is the domain name protocol on Sui, and its FDV reached 3 billion USD on the first day of launch. DEEP, the liquidity protocol on Sui, had an FDV of only 2 billion USD at launch, but it skyrocketed afterwards, reaching a peak FDV of nearly 35 billion USD. After a pullback, it currently remains around 15 billion USD.

According to the author’s observation, Mysten Labs’ support for Walrus exceeds that of SuiNS and Deepbook. Its official Twitter account, co-founders, CEO, and CPO all list Sui and Walrus in the account profile. Based on this speculation, the market value of WAL is highly likely to be higher than that of DEEP, which did not receive this treatment, meaning WAL’s price will be higher than $0.3.

Editor’s fantasy time

Besides being a decentralized storage protocol, Walrus is also a Data Availability (DA) protocol. If compared to the token TIA of the star product Celestia in this field, the price of WAL token will exceed 0.7 US dollars. The extremely optimistic members of the Sui community directly state ‘Walrus = Filecoin + Celestia’. If this model holds true, the price of WAL is expected to reach over 2 US dollars - the editor can rely on Airdrop to work fewer years. Let’s hope the dream comes true.

Valuation Conclusion and Outlook

Compared to high market value storage projects such as FIL and AR, and considering the additional premium brought by the strong support from Mysten Labs and the current market environment, the reasonable price of WAL token may range from 0.3 to 0.6 USDT. If the opening Airdrop selling pressure is significant and falls below 0.2 USDT, the author will consider buying. If the market sentiment is extremely bullish and exceeds 0.8 USDT, the author will sell most of the tokens.

WAL is trading at around $0.3 on PinataBot on Sui, and the pre-market liquidity is shallow, so the price is for reference only.