Hackers, scammers, and memecoin enthusiasts flocked to a huge $850 million airdrop event from Wormhole, a well-known cross-chain bridging platform, which released its native token W on April 3, Cointelegraph wrote.
Wormhole is an interoperability platform, which links almost three dozen blockchains across six different runtimes. It is the basis for more than 200 apps, which have sent over a billion cross-chain messages in total.
The creators of the Wormhole airdrop aimed to reward participants, including developers, dedicated users, and community members, who played an important role in building the Wormhole ecosystem.
Convincing scam accounts targeted airdrop
Like they say, no good deed goes unpunished. Pseudonymous blockchain investigator ZachXBT posted on X on April 3 that a huge number of “convincing scam accounts” had targeted the airdrop. Many of the accounts were officially verified by X with gold checkmarks.
Even Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey’s official X account was hacked. The hacker started posting malicious links from it a few hours after the airdrop announcement. It is believed the links were to suspected wallet drainers. Since then, Burkey’s account has become private.
W token data
The price of the W token at launch was $1.66. W launched on OpenBook, a decentralized exchange (DEX) based on Solana, with a total market capitalization of just under $3 billion. The W token’s current market cap is $2.14 billion and it ranks #58 on CoinGecko. We measure the market cap by multiplying the token price by the circulating token supply. 1.8 billion tokens can be traded on the market today.
Value dropped 28% since launch
The price of the W token is currently $1.19, down 28.3% from that at launch. Gate.io is the most popular exchange to purchase and trade W, where W/USDT is the most active trading pair, with a trading volume of $114 million in the last 24 hours. You can also trade W on OKX and OrangeX.
Despite the falling price, the trading volume of the token has increased since launch. It was $1.4 billion the last 24 hours, signaling a surge in market activity.
No recourse if something goes wrong
Wormhole set aside 6.75% of the total token supply for the airdrop, equivalent to 674 million tokens valued at $896 million in total. Users must meet the platform’s eligibility requirements. An interesting one is that they agree they will have no claim or recourse against Wormhole or its affiliates and that neither Wormhole nor its affiliates will be held liable if the user is unable to claim the airdrop due to gas fees, loss of access to wallet keys or wallets, technical bugs, wallet incompatibility, smart contract issues, etc.
Additionally, participants must agree and acknowledge that cryptocurrencies and digital assets, in general, are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or any other agency, nor are they equivalent to bank deposits and are not guaranteed by any bank.
According to Wormhole, the W token will soon become available as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum Mainnet and other L2 blockchains. It’s currently only on Solana.
Memecoin opportunists rush in
Wormhole’s airdrop was not spared from the intervention of memecoin opportunists. Soon after the airdrop was announced, developers launched a parody token called “Warmhole.” The memecoin surged from an approx. $100,000 market cap at launch to $8.3 million in just a few hours, coming to a spectacular increase of 83,000%.
One X user posted that any Wormhole airdrop recipient who had traded their W tokens for Warmhole tokens immediately would now be a billionaire.
Currently, the Warmhole token’s value is almost zero, and CoinGecko has published a warning that its pool has very low liquidity, due to which prices may differ drastically.
Wormhole’s grim history
In February 2022, a hacker stole ether worth $320 million from the Wormhole Bridge in what was one of the most massive DeFi exploits to date. Thanks to blockchain transaction transparency, sleuths quickly found out what had made the breach possible and took action to patch up the error.
Etherscan, the leading blockchain explorer, identified a wallet containing some of the stolen funds in an effort to warn other users. The Wormhole team tried to negotiate with the hacker via blockchain messages. They offered a bug bounty of $10 million in return for the stolen funds and details of the hack, but the hacker ignored the offer.
What happened?
According to a blog post by crypto investigation platform Elliptic, the hacker minted 120,000 wrapped ether on Solana. Then, he transferred 93,750 ether to the Ethereum Mainnet.
After that, he bridged this ether to Solana, where it remained until January 14, 2023. The funds started moving again on that date. As of January 2023, the hacker held 71,407 wstETH worth approximately $128 million. He also held roughly $3.7 million in SOL in his Solana blockchain account.
