Wormhole airdrop attracts scammers, spoof tokens and a $3B valuation

Crypto scammers, hackers, and meme-coiners have flocked to a massive $850 million airdrop event from cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole, which today released its native governance token (W).

In an April 3 post to X, independent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT noted that Wormhole’s official post announcing the airdrop was targeted by “tons” of convincing scam accounts, many of which sported “gold checkmarks.”

The official X account of the Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey also suffered an attack that saw the founder begin posting malicious links to suspected wallet drainers several hours after the airdrop was announced. Burkey’s account has since been made private.

The W token officially launched on April 3 at a price of $1.66 on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook, commanding a total market capitalization of $2.98 billion at launch.

The token’s price has since fallen 19.5% and is currently trading at $1.34.

The bridging protocol set aside 674 million tokens — 6.75% of the total supply — for the airdrop, meaning that the current total value of the airdrop stands at $896 million for users who met the protocol’s eligibility requirements.

*Wormhole token price action since launch. Source: CoinGecko*

Related: Largest Ethena airdrop recipient gets nearly $2M

Wormhole’s W token is currently only available on the Solana network, however, the project has shared that it will soon be made available on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token and other layer-2 networks at a late date.

Spoof ‘warmhole’ memecoin takes off

The wormhole airdrop event didn’t escape the gaze of opportunistic memecoin developers, with one parody token dubbed “warmhole” being launched immediately following the announcement of the airdrop.

The Warmhole memecoin rapidly shot from a market cap of around $100,000 at launch to a peak value of $8.3 million — an approximate gain of 83,000% in less than six hours.

One user jested that if Wormhole airdrop recipients had immediately traded their new W tokens for the Warmhole memecoin, they would been made billionaires.