Crypto scammers, hackers, and meme-coin enthusiasts have swarmed to Wormhole, a cross-chain bridging platform, for its massive $850 million airdrop event. The platform recently launched its native governance token (W).
ZachXBT, an independent blockchain investigator, highlighted in an April 3 post that Wormhole’s official announcement of the airdrop was bombarded by numerous convincing scam accounts, many of which had “gold checkmarks.”
Furthermore, Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey’s official account on X was also targeted in an attack. After the airdrop was announced, Burkey started posting malicious links to suspected wallet-draining websites. As a result, Burkey’s account has been made private.
The W token was officially released on April 3 with an initial price of $1.66 on the decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook, which is based on the Solana blockchain. At launch, the token commanded a total market capitalization of $2.98 billion.
However, the token’s price has since dropped by 19.5% and is currently trading at $1.34.
For the airdrop, Wormhole set aside 674 million tokens, which accounts for 6.75% of the total supply. This means that the current value of the airdrop is $896 million for users who met the protocol’s eligibility requirements.
Wormhole’s W token is currently only available on the Solana network. However, the project plans to make it accessible on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and other layer-2 networks in the future.
In response to the airdrop, opportunistic meme-coin developers wasted no time and launched a parody token called “warmhole.” The Warmhole memecoin quickly skyrocketed from a market cap of around $100,000 to a peak value of $8.3 million within six hours, representing a staggering gain of 83,000%.
Some users jokingly suggested that if recipients of the Wormhole airdrop had immediately traded their W tokens for the Warmhole memecoin, they would have become billionaires.
In related news, a team of ethical hackers called “SEAL 911” has been formed to combat crypto hacks in real-time. They aim to protect the crypto community from malicious activities.