The individual responsible for the notorious hack involving over 80,000 ETH on Wormhole in 2022 had a momentary opportunity to claim an unknown quantity of airdropped W tokens, as disclosed by blockchain researcher Pland.

Pland humorously mentioned in a social media post that Wormhole had unintentionally included the exploiter in the airdrop.

Following Pland's revelation, Degen News confirmed that four Solana wallets linked to the hacker were in line to receive approximately $52,700 worth of W tokens.

Solana Foundation's Head of Strategy, Austin Federa, found irony in the situation, noting the remarkable commitment to protocol neutrality displayed by the hack incident.

The discovery led to community scrutiny, prompting the Wormhole team to promptly exclude the relevant addresses from the airdrop eligibility. This action was verified by CryptoSlate through the Airdrop Checker website.

Wormhole Airdrop and Security Concerns

Wormhole introduced its native W token on April 3, receiving positive reception from the crypto community. However, the event quickly attracted scam attempts, with phishing links circulating in connection with the airdrop.

Blockchain analyst ZachXBT uncovered numerous accounts posting phishing scams regarding the airdrop.

Web3 security firm Scam Sniffer identified and alerted users to numerous fake accounts and phishing sites related to Wormhole, emphasizing the prevalence of scams during airdrops.

W Token Market Impact

In the initial 24 hours of trading, W token's value declined by more than 25% as claimants from the airdrop began selling their assets.

Although the value surged to $1.59 initially, it dropped substantially to $1.15 at the time of reporting, based on CoinMarketCap data.

Despite the decline in value, major exchanges like Binance and OKX listed the token, boosting its trading volume to rank among the top 10 most actively traded assets within the day.