Wormhole token sinks nearly 25% before bouncing back amid Beeple post and phishing scams

The highly-anticipated Wormhole airdrop appeared to attract attention throughout much of the cryptosphere on Wednesday as the protocol's native token sank nearly 25% before then rebounding by more than 10%.

After surging to a high of $1.66 as of 7:46 a.m. ET, according to CoinGecko, Wormhole's token subsequently declined by nearly 25%, hitting $1.25 around two hours after the 7:30 a.m. ET airdrop. At the time of writing, Wormhole's token had rebounded by more than 10%, changing hands at $1.50 as of 1:01 p.m. ET 

Trading volume had exceeded $17 million at the time of writing, also according to CoinGecko data .

Parallel to Wormhole's fluctuating price, the airdrop attracted interest from some of crypto's bigger names, including world-famous artist Beeple, who shared some Wormhole-inspired art with his over 780,000 followers.

Wormhole-inspired art. Image: Beeple's X profile.

Phishing scams

RELATED INDICES

The blockbuster airdrop also appeared to bring would-be scammers out of the woodwork. X user @0xngmi, from DefiLlama, posted an image to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, aiming to highlight alleged scams posted online.

Internet sleuth ZachXBT also appeared online, attempting to warn people of potential scams looking to take advantage of the heightened interest in Wormhole's airdrop. "Be careful there are tons of accounts with gold checkmarks in the replies posting phishing scams," ZachXBT posted to X .

"We're blocking hundreds of scam comments under the Wormhole airdrop claim," Pocket Universe also posted to X . The company is a browser extension that protects users from scams and wallet drainers.

Nearly 400,000 wallets are eligible to claim 678,823,000 Wormhole tokens, accounting for 6.78% of the total 10 billion supply. The token is a native ERC20 token and a native Solana SPL token, estimated to have an initial circulating supply of 1.8 billion. 

Last year, Wormhole closed a $225 million funding round, which gave it a valuation of $2.5 billion. Investors included top crypto VCs like Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, and Borderless Capital.