Wormhole, a cross-chain bridging platform, recently conducted a massive $850 million airdrop event to introduce its native governance token, W (W).
However, the airdrop event was marred by the presence of crypto scammers, hackers, and memecoin developers. ZachXBT, an independent blockchain investigator, highlighted that Wormhole’s official announcement of the airdrop was targeted by numerous convincing scam accounts, some of which even had verified checkmarks.
Be careful there are tons of accounts with gold checkmarks in the replies posting phishing scams. pic.twitter.com/ioJufnktuP
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) April 3, 2024
Furthermore, Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey’s X account was compromised, leading to the posting of malicious links to suspected wallet-draining schemes shortly after the airdrop announcement. Burkey has since made his account private.
The W token was officially launched on April 3 on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook, starting at a price of $1.66 and achieving a total market capitalization of $2.98 billion. However, its price has since dropped by 19.9%, currently trading at $1.02, according to CoinGecko.
The bridging protocol allocated 674 million tokens, equivalent to 6.75% of the total supply, for the airdrop, resulting in a total airdrop value of $896 million for eligible users.
While the W token is currently exclusive to the Solana network, Wormhole plans to make it available on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and other layer-2 networks in the future.
In response to the airdrop, opportunistic memecoin developers launched a spoof token called “Warmhole.” This memecoin quickly gained traction, with its market cap skyrocketing from $100,000 at launch to a peak of $8.3 million within six hours—an astonishing gain of approximately 83,000%.
Some users humorously remarked that if recipients of the Wormhole airdrop had traded their W tokens for Warmhole immediately, they could have become billionaires.
If you sold your $5k wormhole airdrop for Warmhole this morning you’d be a billionaire right now
— David G 🏹 (@d_gilz) April 3, 2024
