The entity behind the US$320 million Wormhole exploit of 2022 was on the brink of receiving US$50,000 in W tokens through an airdrop.
The error was spotted by pseudonymous X user Pland, prompting the Wormhole team to act and prevent the hacker from claiming the tokens.
The Wormhole team’s response averted a potential reward of 31,642 W tokens to the exploiter.
The protocol, which allows for the transfer of cryptocurrencies across different blockchains, suffered a breach in February 2022, leading to one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) attacks that year.
The recent airdrop is part of Wormhole’s strategy to decentralize, distributing over 675 million W tokens to legitimate users.