Huge Wormhole Airdrop Attracts Scammers As W Plunges 15% After Debuting With $3 Billion Market Cap

Updated: 04 April 2024

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Crypto scammers, hackers and meme coin enthusiasts rushed to the $850 million Wormhole airdrop, which saw 674 million W tokens distributed to users who met its eligibility requirements.

W is the cross-chain bridging platform’s native governance token and was launched on Apr. 3. The token started trading at $1.66 on the Solana-based decentralized exchange OpenBook with a market cap of $2.98 billion and a fully diluted capitalization of $16.5 billion.

W’s price has dropped over 15% in the last 24 hours to trade at $1.17 as of 3:55 a.m. EST. Its market cap has also fallen to just above $2.1 billion, while its fully diluted cap stands at about $11.72 billion.

Fraudsters Pounce On The Wormhole Airdrop

Fraudsters quickly seized the opportunity to scam unsuspecting victims. Independent on-chain analyst ZachXBT revealed that the post regarding Wormhole’s official airdrop was targeted by “tons” of scam accounts. Many of these fake X accounts even included gold checkmarks next to their name.

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

An account belonging to Wormhole founder Robinson Burkey was also compromised by hackers. Once in, the attackers started posting multiple links to suspected wallets drainers just hours after the airdrop was announced. Comments for posts on the X account have since been turned off due to the malicious links.

Comments turned off due to malicious links.

— Robinson (🪱, 🕳️) (@RobinsonBurkey) April 3, 2024

Parody Meme Coins Go Ballistic

Meme coin developers also took advantage of the airdrop event, with one parody token called “Warmhole” being launched immediately after the announcement was made of the Wormhole airdrop.

In the hours after the launch, the meme coin skyrocketed from an initial market cap of approximately $100,000 to a peak capitalization of $8.3 million, achieving a gain of 83,000% in less than six hours.

One X user quipped that if the Wormhole airdrop participants had sold their airdropped tokens and purchased Warmhole with the proceeds they’d be billionaires.