On November 29, Wormhole completed US$225 million in financing at a valuation of US$2.5 billion. There was no leading investor in this round of financing. Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, ParaFi, Dilectic, Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital, and Jump Trading participated cast.

225 million, the largest financing in the crypto field in 2023

This round of financing is also the largest round of financing for cryptocurrency projects in 2023.

"Everyone (owners) is the same," Dan Reecer, chief operating officer of the Wormhole Foundation, said in an interview with "Fortune". In addition, investors’ shares in this round of financing will consist entirely of token warrants, rather than company equity. These warrants, a common fundraising mechanism for cryptocurrency companies, entitle investors to a portion of the total supply of a cryptocurrency that has not yet been launched.

In addition to raising $225 million, the team behind Wormhole also announced the establishment of a new company, Wormhole Labs, to assist in the development of new protocols. Wormhole Labs CEO Saeed Badreg declined to disclose the proportion of the $225 million allocated to Wormhole Labs and the Wormhole Foundation.

Recovering from a theft?

Launched in October 2020 by blockchain infrastructure company Certus One, Wormhole initially took the form of a direct token bridge between the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. Developers within Jump Crypto launched the second version of the protocol in August 2021, leveraging a network of Proof-of-Authority (PoA) guardians as oracles and a network of permissionless relayers to transmit messages across chains. It supports seven different blockchains, including Solana, Terra, Avalanche, Ethereum, Oasis, Binance, and Polygon. Around the same time, Certus One was acquired by Jump Crypto.

Less than a year later, in February 2022, Wormhole was hacked, resulting in a loss of 120,000 ETH (worth approximately $326 million at the time), one of the largest such hacks on record.

Subsequently, on February 4, Jump Crypto announced that it would invest 120,000 ETH to make up for Wormhole’s stolen losses and support Wormhole’s continued development. Jump Crypto stated that it believes in the prospects of multi-chain and believes that Wormhole is an essential infrastructure in the future, so it will continue to support Wormhole and help its continued development.

The subsequent analysis report stated that the vulnerability of Wormhole in this attack was specifically an error in the signature verification code of the core Wormhole contract on the Solana side, allowing the attacker to forge messages from the "guardian" to mint Wormhole-wrapped ETH.

It was not until February 25 this year that Jump Crypto successfully recovered the 120,000 ETH stolen by Wormhole. , according to Blockworks Research's analysis of on-chain data, Jump Crypto and Oasis collaborated to use the upgradeable Oasis contract to successfully obtain stolen funds from the original Wormhole Exploiter's vault.

Since then, operations at Wormhole have been running smoothly. On November 18, Bloomberg reported that top employees, including Wormhole CEO Saeed Badreg, would leave Jump Crypto to run Wormhole independently.

This move is considered to be Jump Crypto continuing to reduce its cryptocurrency business, and the newly established Wormhole Labs is also considered to be proof of the complete separation of Jump Crypto and Wormhole.

Wormhole is going to be airdropped?

On April 1, 2022, it was reported that Wormhole plans to sell 750 million HOLE (accounting for 7.5% of the total supply) to institutional investors at a price of US$0.25 per Token. The tokens will be locked for one year and divided linearly over three years. freed. But later on, Wormhole did not launch a token sale.

Due to the news of this large amount of financing, and in Wormhole's Discord channel, official staff said that exclusive "early" roles will be provided to all members of the Discord server. Many people speculate whether Wormhole will issue coins again?

Airdrop tutorial posts have also appeared in the community to teach you how to interact with Wormhole. The first step is to enter Wormhole's Discord. However, BlockBeats reporters found that as of the time of writing, the Discord had more than 110,000 members. Due to the influx of people, new users have been unable to join the channel since last night and are stuck on the verification interface. BlockBeats reporters were also unable to get past the channel's verification interface when they tried to join the channel.

According to community news, in Wormhole's Discord channel, official staff announced that the "early" role granting time will end at 6:40 a.m. local time on November 30.

In addition to Wormhole's own opportunities, there are also a number of protocols related to Wormhole's potential airdrops. Based on @OlimpioCrypto ’s compilation, BlockBeats sorted out these potential opportunities as follows:

· Use Portal Bridge ( https://www.portalbridge.com/ )

· Use Carrier bridge ( https://www.carrier.so/ )

· Explore Wormhole Ecosystem ( https://wormhole.com/ecosystem/ )

· Do tasks on Zealy ( https://zealy.io/c/wormhole/questboard )