The wallets used by the hacker in the exploit he conducted on Wormhole’s smart contract in February 2022, made him eligible to claim the protocol’s governance token.
The hacker behind the $326 million exploit on Wormhole became eligible to claim over $50,000 in W tokens. According to X user Degen News, the transactions made by the hacker during the exploit in February 2022 in four wallets were used as eligibility criteria to amass over 31,000 W tokens.
The eligibility was found on April 3 by another X user identified as Pland, who highlighted that Wormhole had forgotten to exclude the wallets tied to the hack. Wormhole airdropped its tokens on the same day, with 617 million W being distributed to the early adopters of its cross-chain messaging infrastructure.
Security outlet Rekt News points to the Wormhole security incident as the fifth largest by amount stolen in crypto’s history. On February 2, 2022, a hacker was able to bypass Wormhole’s smart contract to mint 120,000 Wormhole Ether (whETH).
The exploiter quickly sent 93,750 Ether back to Ethereum, and liquidated the rest of its holdings on Solana, converting the amount to USD Coin (USDC) and SOL. However, the whole loss from the incident was refunded by Wormhole’s backer Jump Crypto the day after the exploit.
