Saga Gaming Token Launch Set as Binance Users Stake $3.9 Billion for Rewards

The arrival of the Saga mainnet appears imminent,and the SAGA token itself has a listing date. That’s thanks to massive crypto exchange Binance, which announced a Binance Launchpool program to reward customers with SAGA tokens for staking other coins—and half of the initial circulating supply will be offered up through the promo.

Binance will list the SAGA token on April 9, and up until that point, Binance customers can stake Binance Coin (BNB) or the FDUSD stablecoin into rewards pools via the Launchpool website to earn a share of tokens upon launch.

SAGA will have an initial circulating supply of 90 million tokens (or 9% of the total supply), and half of that is being offered to Launchpool stakers. Since the launch late Wednesday, customers have already staked nearly $3.8 billion worth of funds between the two coins, with 109,000 users staking BNB and about 82,000 users staking FDUSD.

The Saga Network is billed as a layer-1 blockchain that can be used to launch other chains thanks to its “chainlets” architecture. This allows projects to utilize multiple chainlets in unison to power a single application or for projects built on other blockchains to tap into Saga to help support their decentralized apps (dapps).

Saga has emerged thus far primarily as a gaming network, with about 80% of testnet projects falling into that category, though it’s not exclusively designed for the use case.

However, Saga is very much leaning into that vibe. Saga held numerous play-to-airdrop tournaments and competitions across various games from December through February, with winning players earning an allocation of the token airdrop. Saga also teamed with games on chains like Solana and Avalanche for similar events.

The Saga airdrop claim took place in March and recently ended, with more than 200,000 total wallets eligible to earn tokens. This included play-to-airdrop winners, DeFi stakers on chains like Cosmos and Polygon, and owners of prominent NFTs like CryptoPunks and the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The actual token will be live on April 9, and Binance said that it will be the first exchange to list the token. Saga recently announced that its mainnet will launch in April, and that it will also launch an in-house game publishing division called Saga Origins.

Binance Launchpool has already launched two other prominent gaming token campaigns so far in 2024—the two largest gaming token launches this year, in fact, based on the peak market cap for each coin. Pixels (PIXEL) and Portal (PORTAL) both debuted via the platform, with Portal drawing a record $8.6 billion worth of staked crypto via Launchpool.

Residents of many countries—including the United States, Canada, Japan, and Australia—are ineligible for earning rewards on Binance Launchpool. The Launchpool announcement for Saga provides a full list of countries.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.