Japanese Exchange GMO to Offer XRP Users Yen for Delayed Songbird Airdrop

Japanese crypto exchange GMO will deposit the Yen equivalent of songbird (SGB) tokens to some traders who held XRP in 2020, a post on the exchange shows.

Users will receive yen equivalent of 0.1511 SGB for every 1 XRP held as of Dec. 12, 2020.

Songbird is an experimental, blockchain for the Flare Network. Flare, initially aimed to become a decentralized-finance (DeFi) application that used XRP tokens, but gradually made a transition to a layer 1 blockchain.

Snapshots of XRP on blockchains and on exchanges was taken on Dec.12, 2020 and holders were meant to receive both Flare’s FLR and SGB airdrops. But Ripple’s court case with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delayed airdrop plans: FLR tokens were distributed to XRP holders after nearly a two-year wait, while SGB was delayed even further.

However, due to local laws, holders residing in Japan were deemed “not eligible for this airdrop” by some exchanges. GMO, one of the few regulated exchanges in the country, in an apparent move to keep users happy “decided to issue Songbird airdrops to Ripple holders in Japanese yen.”

“Eligible: Customers who held physical Ripple (XRP) in our company account as of 9:00 on Saturday, December 12, 2020,” a notice reads. “Quantity based on a snapshot of Ripple (XRP) converted into Japanese yen using our arbitrary method and time.”

GMO said it would be distributing Yen to accounts by Sept.29, 2023.