Binance Distributes $12.5 Million NEWT Tokens in HODLer Airdrop Campaign

Binance has announced a significant airdrop campaign, listing Newton Protocol (NEWT) as the 24th project in its HODLer Airdrops initiative. The campaign will distribute a total of $12.5 million USD worth of NEWT tokens to BNB holders. NEWT is an AI-driven onchain automation protocol developed on trusted execution environments and zero knowledge proofs, ensuring secure and verifiable agent-based finance. The token listing will commence on June 24, 2025, at 14:00 AM (UTC), with spot trading available in pairs with USDT, USDC, BNB, FDUSD, and TRY.

Newton Protocol is designed to underpin secure agent-based smart contracts on-chain, which is crucial for AI-based financial applications. Developed by the Magic Newton Foundation and funded by Magic Labs, NEWT combines trusted execution environments (TEEs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to ensure that automated processes, such as trading bots or AI agents, run securely and verifiably. NEWT is deployed on the Ethereum mainnet and BNB Chain, featuring a modular architecture that allows developers to create, authorize, and govern onchain agents.

Binance’s HODLer Airdrops is a reward mechanism that distributes tokens to BNB holders who lock or flexibly stake their assets in Simple Earn or On-Chain Yields products. Users must have been active between June 14, 2025, and June 17, 2025 (UTC) to qualify. BNB holdings were sampled hourly to ensure a fair distribution, with a pool of 12.5 million NEWT (1.25% of the total supply) allocated to this airdrop. Even users not actively farming or staking NEWT qualify if they had BNB in the supported earning products during the snapshot window.

NEWT will be listed on Binance Spot with temporary support on Binance Alpha for early access and discovery. When spot trading begins, Alpha support will be discontinued. The total supply of NEWT is 1,000,000,000 tokens, with 215,000,000 NEWT (21.5%) circulating at launch. The airdrop allocation is 12,500,000 NEWT for the HODLer campaign, with an additional 12,500,000 NEWT to be released for marketing purposes in six months.

The integration of AI and DeFi represents a structural upgrade in how blockchains process complexity. Newton Protocol aims to leverage this by allowing AI agents to operate in a decentralized, rules-based environment. Key features include staking-based incentives, an agent authorization layer, and a developer toolkit with open-source APIs and SDKs. This infrastructure ensures secure and verifiable computation, uniting AI’s potential for rich computation with blockchain’s requirements for trustless computing.

In addition to the Binance airdrop, the Magic Newton Foundation is conducting a separate airdrop for early users. Eligibility criteria include interacting with Newton.xyz before June 12, 2025, engaging with the project’s Discord or Guild.xyz channels, participating in the Kaito Yappers campaign before June 19, and using a Magic Labs-embedded wallet on Ethereum or Polygon between July 1, 2024, and December 21, 2024. Participants who stake their airdropped NEWT and hold it for 30 days will receive a 25% bonus available in August 2025.

Newton Protocol’s governance model aligns protocol incentives with holders for the long term. NEWT staking gives users the right to propose and vote on protocol changes, with enhanced enforcement via secure onchain agents. Validators can run or delegate on validator nodes, and the token distribution, team reserve, and treasury reserve are transparent. This approach could attract users who value clear, up-front, and aligned incentives in an industry often characterized by opaque or loosely structured DeFi projects.

Binance’s HODLer Airdrops are evolving into a more passive option compared to aggressive farming and staking. Users can gain exposure to promising early-stage projects by simply engaging with BNB earning products. For projects like Newton Protocol, this strategy provides a wide distribution base, bootstraps community involvement, and offers early liquidity on the world’s largest exchange, reinforcing BNB’s central utility within the Binance ecosystem.