Crypto Community Exposed to Scammers Amid Wormhole's $850 Million Airdrop Event

A recent $850 million airdrop event by cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole has attracted various crypto scammers, hackers, and meme-coin enthusiasts.

The event, which introduced Wormhole's native governance token (W), saw a surge in malicious activity. Independent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT highlighted the proliferation of convincing scam accounts targeting Wormhole's official airdrop announcement. Many of these accounts even displayed "gold checkmarks" to appear legitimate.

Moreover, Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey's official account on X was compromised, leading to the dissemination of malicious links aimed at draining wallets. Burkey's account has since been made private to mitigate further damage.

The W token was officially launched on April 3 at a price of $1.66 on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook, achieving a total market capitalization of $2.98 billion. However, the token's value has since dropped by 19.5% and is currently trading at $1.34.

For the airdrop, Wormhole set aside 674 million tokens, equivalent to 6.75% of the total supply, with an estimated total value of $896 million for eligible users.

Currently, the W token is exclusive to the Solana network, but the project plans to expand its availability to the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and other layer-2 networks in the future.

In a related development, a memecoin called "warmhole" emerged as a parody token shortly after the Wormhole airdrop announcement. Despite its satirical nature, Warmhole experienced a remarkable surge in value, soaring from a market cap of approximately $100,000 to a peak of $8.3 million in less than six hours—an astounding increase of 83,000%.

One user jokingly suggested that if recipients of the Wormhole airdrop had promptly exchanged their new W tokens for the Warmhole memecoin, they would have become billionaires.