The mastermind behind the notorious $320 million breach of the Wormhole bridge in 2022 was initially considered eligible for an airdrop that would have allowed the hacker to claim $50,000 worth of newly-launched W tokens.
On April 4, pseudonymous researcher Pland revealed in a post on X that the Wormhole team had overlooked excluding several wallet addresses associated with the exploit, which resulted in hackers stealing $321 million in cryptocurrency from the cross-chain bridge in 2022.
Airdrop.link, a Solana-based airdrop checker, later mentioned in an April 4 post on X by Degen News, that a total of four wallet addresses were temporarily able to claim Wormhole’s airdrop.
If the hacker had chosen to claim the airdrops, they would have been entitled to approximately 31,642 Wormhole (W) tokens, valued at around $50,000 based on current prices.
However, Cointelegraph independently verified the wallet addresses on airdrop.link and discovered that they were no longer eligible, suggesting that the Wormhole team may have already rectified the issue.
Cointelegraph reached out to Wormhole for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
All four of the eligible wallet addresses were identified as being connected to the 2022 Wormhole exploit by Solana block explorer Solana.fm.
The Wormhole bridge was exploited for an astonishing $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 conducted a successful “counter exploit” on the Wormhole protocol hacker.
The two firms managed to recover a total of $225 million in digital assets from the wormhole exploiter and subsequently 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, to eligible users through an airdrop.
In other news, a team of white-hat hackers known as the “SEAL 911” has been formed to combat real-time crypto hacks.