Wormhole’s W token will initially launch on the Solana network before expanding to other EVM chains using Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers.

Cross-chain infrastructure protocol Wormhole has released a roadmap for its upcoming token W, sharing details of the launch schedule and getting into the high-level details of its plans for the token’s utility.

Wormhole plans to roll out the W token initially on Solana as a native SPL token, which refers to the fungible token standard on the Solana blockchain. 

“Solana’s high-performance ecosystem offers the ideal foundation for W, providing scalability, low transaction costs, and rapid processing times,” said Wormhole, explaining that this phase would set the foundation for W’s multichain ambitions.

After W’s launch on Solana, it will expand to all Wormhole-connect Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains using Wormhole Native Token Transfers or NTT — an open-source framework for transferring tokens across blockchains without liquidity pools.

NTT is designed to give projects greater control over how their tokens behave on each of the different networks that they live on, right down to the metadata, token standard and upgradeability. In this way, projects will be able to enforce rate-limits, access control, balance accounting and pauses.

Token holders will be able to lock and delegate their tokens on both Solana and EVM chains, and can participate in governance by self registering to vote or providing that right to another actor with additional voting weight.

Wormhole also envisions that the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) will operate via an “industry-first multichain governance system” that will be available on Solana, Ethereum and EVM layer 2 chains at launch.

Last month, Wormhole announced plans to airdrop 617 million W tokens to be allocated across 397,704 wallets. The proposed method of determining which users qualified for an airdrop, however, became the subject of controversy, with some ecosystems participants complaining that “real Wormhole users got peanuts.”