Portal Debuts at Lofty $2.5B Valuation – The Defiant

Money is flying around as the crypto market heats up.

One such project is Portal, whose eponymous token went live today at a market capitalization of over $400 million. That puts PORTAL in the top 200 digital assets, according to CoinGecko.

PORTAL currently has a fully diluted valuation ( FDV), the market capitalization of a project when all its tokens are in circulation, of $2.37 billion. The project’s website says holders of PORTAL will be able to stake it for access to other tokens, for governance, and “purchase a node,” among other use cases.

Portal’s website bills the token as a “universal gaming coin” and the project’s X account has produced a steady stream of partnership announcements, including with Magic Eden, Star Atlas, and DeFi Kingdoms. Its website claims it has already integrated with over 200 games.

A video from Portal says the project will bring web3 gaming into the mainstream by making the blockchain aspect of the space “invisible.” Portal is using LayerZero, an interoperability protocol, to support the Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Klaytn blockchains, according to its X account.

With Bitcoin trading less than $10,000 away from an all-time high and the global crypto market capitalization nearing $2.5 trillion, projects like PORTAL can spring up to quickly generate hype and excitement, which likely wouldn’t be possible in an extended bear market. It’s not clear yet whether the project, and the token, can sustain the current attention and valuation levels.

Portal ran an engagement campaign and presale in mid-December. Early buyers were able to purchase PORTAL at $0.15, according to multiple accounts on X, and are up 16x on their initial investment going by the token’s current price of $2.41.

Users on X are reporting that they’re only able to unlock 15% of the tokens they purchased through the presale.

A dashboard from Portal shows that a private sale and a community sale of the tokens have already completed. The public presale went live in December. PORTAL also went live today on Binance’s launchpad platform, which facilitates token sales.

Both sales combined account for 32% of the token’s $1B supply, according to a chart of PORTAL’s tokenomics circulating on social media. The current circulating supply is 167 million tokens, or 16.7% of the total 1 billion PORTAL, according to Etherscan.

For now, people appear to be selling the token — block explorer Etherscan shows traders unloading clips of PORTAL in amounts generally ranging from the hundreds to the low ten thousands.

An associated NFT project, called Creepz, is rumored to be a big winner with PORTAL — holders of the NFTs will receive an airdrop of PORTAL tokens, according to the project’s website. The allocation is not yet public. The NFTs have nearly doubled in value from 2.9 ETH to 5.7 ETH in the last month leading up to PORTAL’s launch.