Tokens worth over 800 million US dollars: The bridge project Wormhole put together a big airdrop package last week in order to place the newly launched W token on the market with media impact. A worthwhile deal – at least for eligible participants. According to the current valuation, the token reaches a market capitalization of 1.4 billion US dollars after just a few days: 80th place among the largest cryptocurrencies. A total of six percent of the total token supply was released during the airdrop. But it didn’t go completely smoothly.
Parallel to the airdrop, there were some fraud attempts on X. Under the announcement, the official Wormhole account linked to several fraudulent phishing sites. Among the profiles there were also some X-verified ones with a golden tick.
Wormhole founder Robinson Burke’s account was also redirected to fraudulent websites after it was hacked. The profile has now been set to private.
Wormhole hacker is back
Curiously, the person who stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the project in a cyber attack a few years ago also ended up on the list of participants. Apparently they initially failed to block the actually known wallet address. A total of four wallet addresses that are connected to the exploit at the time were initially eligible for the airdrop. These would have qualified for the issuance of $50,000 worth of tokens, but were later removed from the list.
In the February 2022 attack on Wormhole, the hacker exploited a security flaw that allowed him to “mine” 120,000 Wrapped Ether (wETH) on the Solana blockchain. The loss for the Wormhole project was approximately $320 million – one of the worst crypto exploits ever.
The Wormhole team then offered the hacker a ransom of ten million US dollars. The 120,000 ETH has been replaced. Almost a year after the incident, Wormhole received permission to reclaim the assets through a court decision. About $140 million was secured through changes to the protocol.
What does Wormhole do?
Establishing data traffic between blockchains: This is the function of the so-called interoperability platform Wormhole. As a bridge between networks, Wormhole enables multichain applications and the transfer of any data between blockchains. The project was founded in 2020, originally with the aim of connecting Ethereum and Solana. At the time, Wormhole was the only way to transfer assets between Ethereum and Solana at scale.
Almost 30 blockchains, including Polkadot, Base and Avalanche, are now connected to Wormhole. According to official information, over 200 applications and more than a million wallets use it.
This might also interest you