Crypto scammers, hackers, and meme-coin enthusiasts have swarmed to participate in a massive $850 million airdrop event hosted by cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole. The platform recently launched its native governance token (W), attracting significant attention from fraudsters.
Independent blockchain investigator ZachXBT observed in an April 3 post on X that Wormhole’s official announcement of the airdrop was inundated with numerous scam accounts, many of which appeared authentic with “gold checkmarks.”
Notably, the official X account of Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey was also compromised. Following the airdrop announcement, Burkey’s account started sharing malicious links suspected of emptying users’ wallets. As a result, Burkey’s account has been made private.
On April 3, the W token was officially launched on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook at a price of $1.66. At launch, the token commanded a total market capitalization of $2.98 billion.
However, the token’s value has since dropped by 19.5% and is currently being traded at $1.34.
For the airdrop, the bridging protocol allocated 674 million tokens, which accounts for 6.75% of the total supply. As a result, the current total value of the airdrop is estimated to be $896 million for users who met the protocol’s eligibility criteria.
Since its launch, the W token has only been available on the Solana network. Nevertheless, Wormhole has revealed plans to make the token accessible on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and other layer-2 networks in the future.
Interestingly, opportunistic meme-coin developers wasted no time in capitalizing on the wormhole airdrop event. Immediately after the announcement, a parody token called “warmhole” was launched. The Warmhole meme-coin quickly surged from an initial market cap of around $100,000 to a peak value of $8.3 million within six hours, marking an approximate gain of 83,000%.
In a humorous twist, one user joked that if Wormhole airdrop recipients had immediately traded their newly acquired W tokens for Warmhole meme-coins, they would have become billionaires.
In other news, a group of ethical hackers known as the “SEAL 911” team has been formed to combat crypto hacks in real-time. Their mission is to protect the crypto community from security threats and ensure a safe environment for all participants.
Magazine:
David G