From ‘Super Airdrop Hunters’ to Malicious Actors

Arbitrum’s much-anticipated token airdrop shook up the crypto space as on-chain activity of the popular layer-2 solution soared to levels not seen before. With the introduction of the ARB token, Arbitrum finally transformed into a DAO.

Meanwhile, the hunters of this cash rain raked in an impressive amount of ARB tokens. In the first hour alone, over 42 million ARB tokens were claimed. New data found two “super airdrop hunters” that received 1.4 million ARB, worth around $1.92 million, and 933,375 ARB, worth $1.28 million. Collectively, the two “hunters” acquired around $3.3 million via 1,496 addresses.

• As per the blockchain analysis firm Lookonchain, the account that received 1.4 million ARB added the entire amount to the decentralized exchange Uniswap to provide liquidity.
• The craze behind the airdrop has paved the way for bad actors in the space to fetch the tokens.
• Founder and CEO of Hashscan NFT growth platform, Alexander Tkachenko, revealed that a hacker made over $500k by claiming the ARB airdrop with compromised vanity addresses.
• Interestingly, all of these addresses were created with Profanity, a tool for the activation of so-called “vanity addresses,” which are custom crypto wallets with identifiable names or numbers within them. Last year, 1inch contributors found that the process used by Profanity to generate the addresses is susceptible to attacks and deemed the took to be unsafe.
• In yet another instance, crypto intelligence platform Arkham spotted a wallet in anticipation of the airdrop from more than 2,400 presumably compromised wallets. The hacker was found to have sent small amounts of ETH to pay for gas to claim ARB several hours before the airdrop.