Scammers quickly noticed the cross-chain bridge’s airdrop, which was scheduled to give away over $800 million worth of W tokens to a limited number of users. The $850 million airdrop event from cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole, which today issued its native governance token (W), has drawn a large number of cryptocurrency fraudsters, hackers, and meme-coiners.
Independent blockchain expert ZachXBT reported on April 3rd on X that “tons” of plausible fake accounts, many of which had “gold checkmarks,” were targeting Wormhole’s official post announcing the airdrop.
Hours Within The Announcement Creator Of Wormhole Begins To Publish Fraudulent Links
A few hours after the airdrop announcement, Robinson Burkey, the creator of the Wormhole, started publishing fraudulent links to what seemed to be wallet drainers on his official X account. Since then, Burkey’s account has been turned private. On April 3, the W token had its formal debut on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenBook, commanding a market value of $2.98 billion upon launch, with a price of $1.66.
Since then, the token’s price has dropped by 19.5%, and it is now trading at $1.34. For the airdrop, the bridging protocol reserved 674 million tokens, or 6.75 percent of the entire supply. For users that satisfied the protocol’s eligibility rules, this means that the airdrop’s current total worth is $896 million.
