Wormhole Bridge $320M Hacker Was Reportedly Eligible for W Tokens Airdrop

The hacker chargeable for the $321 million Wormhole bridge hack was initially thought-about certified for a current airdrop of a newly launched W token the place the explorer may declare $50,000.

The Wormhole bridge suffered an exploit in February 2022, making it one of the vital vital hacks within the crypto business’s historical past.

Wormhole Airdrop Lists Hacker as Eligible

On April 3, Wormhole introduced its airdrop of greater than 675 million W tokens, price about $850,000 at present costs, to eligible customers.

A day later, Pland, a pseudonymous researcher, claimed that the Wormhole crew ignored excluding sure pockets addresses related to an exploit that resulted in hackers stealing $321 million in cryptocurrency from the cross-chain bridge.

Wormhole forgot to exclude the exploiter from the airdrop pic.twitter.com/xkkpDz9RAl

— Pland (@Pland__) April 3, 2024

In response to information from the Solana-based airdrop checker airdrop.hyperlink, 4 pockets addresses have been briefly permitted to say Wormhole’s airdrop. Had the hacker chosen to say their airdrops, they’d have been entitled to roughly 31,642 Wormhole (W) tokens, valued at round $50,000 primarily based on present costs.

Nonetheless, investigations on airdrop.hyperlink revealed that these pockets addresses have been not eligible, indicating that the Wormhole crew might need already addressed the problem.

In the meantime, the W token opened at $1.66 on the Solana-based decentralized trade (DEX) OpenBook, with a market capitalization of $3 billion and a totally diluted worth of $16.5 billion, as reported by CoinGecko. Following its launch, OpenBook encountered vital congestion, resulting in reviews of inaccessibility from a number of customers.

The tokens launched represent 6% of the full provide, with a further 12% allotted to core contributors and 23.3% earmarked for the muse’s treasury. Initially launched on Solana, the token can be natively issued on Ethereum and layer-2 networks later.

Wormhole Hack Vulnerability Exploited

In 2022, an exploiter exploited a vulnerability on the Wormhole liquidity bridge connecting the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, shedding 120,000 wrapped ether.

After struggling an exploit, Web3 infrastructure agency Bounce Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app executed a ‘counter exploit’ on the Wormhole protocol hacker in February 2023. These entities efficiently recovered $225 million in digital belongings from the wormhole exploiter and returned them to safe wallets.

Because the hack, the corporate has improved its safety and even introduced two bug bounty applications, every providing $2.5 million in rewards to encourage figuring out and submitting potential vulnerabilities for patching. As well as, a number of third-party corporations performed audits to deal with vital points in Wormhole’s system.