Omni Network token falls 55% after airdrop, fake token completely rugs

The Omni Network’s ERC-20 token OMNI dropped over 55% nearly 18 hours after its airdrop, shaving off over half its market capitalization.

Meanwhile, a fake token sporting the same name has just been “rug pulled,” with its price dumping 100%.

The layer-1 testnet blockchain aiming to connect Ethereum rollups doled 3 million OMNI — 3% of its 100 million token supply — to its community contributors on April 17, starting at 11 am UTC. OMNI, market cap was $560 million.

Within half an hour, OMNI dropped nearly 30% from $53.80 to under $39 and has continued to slide to around $24 — an over 55% drop.

The current market cap is $267.5 million, giving it a fully diluted valuation of about $2.57 billion, according to CoinGecko.

The airdrop saw early testnet users, builders and community participants get 50% — 1.5 million OMNI — of the latest airdrop, worth about $36.2 million. Eligibility was determined via a snapshot on April 3.

The remaining tokens were split variously between EigenLayer restakers and some nonfungible token (NFT) projects including Pudgy Penguins, among others.

Omni Network outlined on April 15 that 9.27 million OMNI — 9.27% of the total supply — was being set aside as public launch tokens used for “launch pools and liquidity.”

The largest chunk of OMNI — 29.5 million at 29.5% of its supply — will be set aside for “ecosystem development” and handed out initially at the discretion of the blockchain’s backing firm, the Omni Foundation.

Nearly a quarter of all OMNI — 23.3 million — was earmarked for investors and advisers.

Advisers today received 625,000 OMNI worth $15 million — another 875,000 OMNI will come after a year, then 437,500 OMNI every six months for two years.

Investors’ tokens were on a three-year unlock schedule, with nearly 6.7 million tokens — worth almost $161 million today — to come after 12 months, with the rest unlocking every six months until their allocation is exhausted.

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Meanwhile, the developers of a fake OMNI token using the same ticker have pulled a $398,000 exit scam .

Blockchain security firm PeckShield wrote in an April 18 X post that a fake token dropped 100% after the deploying smart contract dumped over 1.7 quadrillion tokens for 132 Wrapped Ether (WETH).

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