• GMO Coin has announced the incoming airdrop of Songbird (SGB).
• This shows the exchange is a major backer of the Ripple-backed Flare.

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange GMO Coin has announced plans for an airdrop for Ripple’s XRP holders. According to the announcement, Songbird (SGB) airdrops will be distributed to certain XRP holders in Japanese yen. Customers who have held XRP in the company’s account since December 12th, 2020 are deemed eligible for the airdrop. As GMO Coin outlined, customers who patronize the company’s crypto asset lending services are also eligible for the giveaway.

In addition, GMO Coin’s customers who sold their XRP coins immediately after December 12th will also receive a share of the funds to be distributed.

For every unit of XRP held on the trading platform as of the stipulated time, holders will receive an equivalent of 0.1511 SGB. Hence, the amount of airdrop each GMO user will receive will be solely dependent on their XRP holdings at the time. The distribution is scheduled to take place on September 29th, 2023. 

Noteworthy, the SGB airdrop shows that GMO has joined the list of crypto exchanges that support the token. Some of the other exchanges on this list are Binance, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC Global, Bithumb, Cryptocom, and Upbit. They also featured in the list shared last year by Flare Network, the protocol behind SGB, for exchange supporting the airdrop of both Flare (FLR) tokens and SGB. 

The token airdrops were supposed to happen in December 2020 but were however disrupted by Ripple’s lawsuit with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

It wasn’t until January 10th, 2023 that the FLR tokens were finally airdropped to the exchanges and that marked its first token distribution exercise. Markedly, the airdrop of SGB, a canary network to Flare was postponed. Per a statement from the blockchain network, a total of 4.279 billion Flare (FLR) tokens have been distributed, representing 15% of the total supply. Just like in the case of GMO, all of the cryptocurrency exchanges were tasked with distributing the coins to XRP holders who qualify.

The Emergence of Songbird 

Songbird, which was initially designed to serve as a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) application that utilizes the XRP token, is an experimental blockchain for the Flare Network. Gradually, the protocol transitioned to a Layer-1 blockchain and it is now regarded as an advanced testing network. It was launched over two years ago and in September and completed its first 10 days in observation mode. 

The observation mode was one of the three test phases to strengthen the protocols underlying Flare Network’s eventual launch. Two months after its launch, Panther Protocol, which was already in partnership with Flare, decided to expand the relationship to include Songbird. 

The deal meant that Songbird would integrate Panther’s Shielded Pools into its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to enable on-chain privacy for its users. Also, Panther agreed to deploy its privacy-preserving infrastructure on Songbird for code testing which would, in turn, offer Panther users access to private transactions over Songbird.