By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 3rd, 2024
The hacker involved in the 2022 exploit of the Wormhole ETH-SOL bridge could have received up to $50,000 from Wormhole’s recent airdrop.
The hacker responsible for the Wormhole bridge hack in 2022 was surprisingly eligible for the new airdrop for the platform’s W tokens. For a while, the same hacker behind the $320 million drain in February 2022 was in line to receive up to $50,000 worth of the new tokens.
Wormhole Did Not Exclude Hacker Wallets from Airdrop
According to an X post by researcher Pland, Wormhole “forgot” to exclude a few wallet addresses from the airdrop. A Degen News X post specified that 4 wallets involved in the exploit were eligible for an airdrop of about 31,642 W tokens.
As of this writing, the wallet addresses were no longer eligible.
In February, Wormhole announced plans for increased decentralization in its ecosystem by distributing W tokens. Intended recipients include investors, core contributors, shareholders, and the entire community. The interoperability platform also disclosed a few details of the airdrop, targeting about 400,000 wallets. The airdrop allocation includes 500 million tokens for on-chain activities and about 117 million for community members. Criteria for eligibility include on-chain activity and community engagement. However, core contributors are not eligible for the airdrop and have been allocated 12% of the W token supply, which will be unlocked later.
The Hack
The interoperability platform suffered a hack on February 2 on the Solana side of the SOL-ETH bridge. In an official post, Wormhole announced that the hacker made away with 120,000 Wrapped ETH (wETH), stating that it will maintain the 1:1 peg by adding more ETH. At the time, the hack was the largest in 2022 and the second-largest in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. After the exploit, the hacker redeemed 93,750 wETH worth $345 million and then used funds to buy several other assets. These include SportX (SX), Meta Capital (MCAP), and Finally Usable Crypto Karma (FUCK). The hacker then swapped more wETH for USDC and Solana (SOL).
In a blockchain message, Wormhole developers offered the exploiter a “whitehat agreement” allowing the person to keep $10 million and return the rest. Unfortunately, the hacker didn’t take the offer. However, a February 2023 report suggests that Jump Crypto, a firm involved in the development of Wormhole, was able to retrieve “certain assets involved with the wallet address associated with the Wormhole Exploit”.
999% in W Token Yield
In other Wormhole news, Solana DeFi platform Kamino is paying stakers a weekly yield of more than 999% via W and JTO tokens. Users who stake W tokens paired with JitoSOL in Kamino’s Solana liquidity pool can get over 999% in weekly yield. Rewards obtainable exceed 666 JTO and 3,300 W per day, worth $7,000 at current prices. The JTO token is an asset users receive when they stake SOL on Solana-based protocol, Jito.
As of Thursday morning, the liquidity pool had a little less than $5 million locked, about 66% of its $7.5 million maximum capacity. In 24 hours, the pool recorded a trading volume of $6 million and generated $17,000 in fees.