The infamous Wormhole bridge hacker, responsible for a staggering $320-million exploit, was briefly eligible for a recent airdrop of newly launched Wormhole (W) tokens, potentially claiming up to $50,000.
An April 4 post by pseudonymous researcher Plan revealed that the Wormhole team had inadvertently failed to exclude several wallet addresses linked to the 2022 exploit, which resulted in the theft of $321 million in cryptocurrency from the Wormhole bridge.
Data from the Solana-based airdrop checker, Airdrop.link, later referenced by Degen News in an April 4 post, indicated that four wallet addresses associated with the exploit were temporarily able to claim the Wormhole airdrop. Had the hacker chosen to claim their airdrops, they could have received approximately 31,642 Wormhole (W) tokens, valued at around $50,000 at current Wormhole prices.
Upon independently verifying the wallet addresses on Airdrop.link, we discovered they were no longer eligible, suggesting that the Wormhole team had rectified the oversight.
Despite reaching out to Wormhole, we received no response by the time of publication.
Solana block explorer, Solana.fm, flagged all four eligible wallet addresses as being connected to the 2022 Wormhole exploit.
The Wormhole bridge suffered a massive $321 million exploit in February 2022, marking it as one of the most significant hacks in the cryptocurrency industry’s history.
However, in February 2023, Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app executed a successful “counter exploit” on the Wormhole protocol hacker, recovering a total of $225 million in digital assets from the Wormhole exploiter and returning them to secure wallets.
