Crypto scammers, hackers, and meme-coin enthusiasts have swarmed to participate in a massive $850 million airdrop event organized by cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole. The platform recently introduced its native governance token (W).
Independent blockchain investigator ZachXBT pointed out in an April 3 post on X that Wormhole’s official announcement about the airdrop attracted numerous convincing scam accounts, many of which had “gold checkmarks.”
Source:
ZachXBT
Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey’s official X account also fell victim to an attack. After the airdrop was announced, Burkey’s account started posting malicious links to suspected wallet thieves. As a result, his account has been set to private.
Source: Robinson Burkey
The W token was officially launched on April 3 on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook for a price of $1.66. At launch, the token commanded a total market capitalization of $2.98 billion.
However, the token’s price has dropped by 19.5% and is currently trading at $1.34.
For the airdrop, the bridging protocol allocated 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 eligibility requirements set by the protocol.
Wormhole token price performance since launch. Source: CoinGecko
In related news, Wormhole’s W token is currently only accessible on the Solana network. However, the project has revealed that the token will soon be available on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and on other layer-2 networks at a later date.
The wormhole airdrop event caught the attention of opportunistic meme-coin developers, leading to the launch of a parody token called “warmhole” right after the airdrop was announced.
The Warmhole meme-coin quickly surged from a market cap of approximately $100,000 at launch to a peak value of $8.3 million in less than six hours, representing an approximate gain of 83,000%.
One user jokingly suggested that if recipients of the Wormhole airdrop had immediately traded their new W tokens for the Warmhole meme-coin, they would have become billionaires.
Source: David G
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