The mastermind behind the famous $320 million hack of the Wormhole bridge in 2022 was initially considered eligible for an airdrop that would have allowed them to claim $50,000 worth of newly-launched W tokens.
On April 4, an anonymous researcher named Pland stated in a post on X that the Wormhole team had unintentionally included several wallet addresses associated with the hack, which resulted in hackers stealing $321 million in cryptocurrency from the cross-chain bridge in 2022.
Airdrop.link, a Solana-based airdrop checker, later confirmed in a post on X cited by Degen News on April 4 that four wallet addresses were temporarily able to claim the Wormhole airdrop.
If the hacker had chosen to claim their airdrops, they would have received approximately 31,642 Wormhole (W) tokens, valued at around $50,000 based on current prices.
Cointelegraph independently verified the wallet addresses on airdrop.link but found that they were no longer eligible, indicating that the Wormhole team may have already fixed the issue.
Cointelegraph reached out to Wormhole for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
All four eligible wallet addresses were identified as linked to the 2022 Wormhole hack by Solana block explorer Solana.fm.
The Wormhole bridge was exploited for a staggering $321 million in February 2022, making it one of the largest hacks in the history of the cryptocurrency industry.
However, in February 2023, Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app launched a successful “counter exploit” against the hacker of the Wormhole protocol.
The two companies managed to recover a total of $225 million in digital assets from the wormhole exploiter and returned them to secure wallets.
On April 3, Wormhole announced that it would be distributing over 675 million of its new Wormhole (W) tokens, valued at approximately $850 million based on current prices, through an airdrop to eligible users.
A team of white-hat hackers called “SEAL 911” has been formed to combat real-time crypto hacks.