The highly anticipated $850 million airdrop event by cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole has drawn the attention of crypto scammers.
The highly anticipated $850 million airdrop event by cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole has drawn the attention of crypto scammers. The platform recently released its native governance token, W, leading to a surge in fraudulent activities.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT pointed out that the official announcement of the airdrop on X was bombarded by numerous convincing scam accounts, some even sporting "gold checkmarks" to appear legitimate. Additionally, the official X account of Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey was compromised, with the founder posting malicious links to suspected wallet-draining sites hours after the airdrop was revealed. Burkey's account has since been made private to mitigate further damage.
The W token was officially launched on April 3 on the Solana-based decentralized exchange, OpenBook, with an initial price of $1.66. However, the token's price has dipped and is currently trading at $1.21, with a market capitalization of $2.17 billion. W also launched on the top centralized exchanges like Binance, OKX and Bybit, and saw over $1.58 billion in trading volume in its first day, making it the 12th most traded token.
As part of the airdrop, Wormhole allocated 674 million tokens, equivalent to 6.75% of the total supply, to eligible participants. This puts the total value of the airdrop at $896 million for those who met the airdrop requirements. While the W token is currently available only on the Solana network, Wormhole plans to make it accessible on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and other layer-2 networks in the future.
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