Today, Jesse Johnson, the co-founder of the Aavegotchi smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, provided an update regarding an incident in which a cryptocurrency user lost his entire on-chain life savings in LINK tokens. This information was shared in reference to an incident that occurred earlier today.
Johnson stated that the project was successful in sending the user, who goes by the handle @D13Kabani, approximately $11,000 worth of tokens. He also stated that the tokens were contributed by more than 200 different deposits, and that they were contributed through a donation page that was created to assist Dawid in recovering the funds:
According to the latest information, a user who is a father of two and is passionate about Aavegotchi rushed through a simple copy-and-paste operation and inadvertently sent 4,005 LINK to the staking contract rather than sending it to a Binance deposit address. The Aavegotchi team went into further detail about the matter and explained the unchangeability of the situation as follows:
There is no “undo” button in the world of cryptocurrency, and those LINK are permanently enmeshed in the GHST staking contract, which cannot be upgraded.
The author of the smart contract, Nick Mudge, had previously proposed a similar concept and stated that the missing LINK funds are most likely “stuck” in the Ethereum diamond permanently.
On December 11th, when LINK was already experiencing a downward trend, Dawid made the mistake of using a smart contract. Since then, it has experienced a loss of 2.5% and is currently valued at approximately $11.26 at this time. Two days after the event, Dawid made the following statement:
People genuinely want to assist me both mentally and monetarily, and the entire cryptocurrency community lends a hand to me in this endeavour.
The following is an addition that Dawid made in a subsequent tweet:
Many of the people I talked to had, like me, lost a significant amount of money through a variety of means. People are reluctant to discuss it because they feel ashamed of it, but I think it’s important that you do so because the vast majority of people are willing to lend a helping hand.
The user even tried to get assistance from Vitalik Buterin, after which Nick Mudge asked Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin to undo the transaction by means of a hard fork:
Please, @VitalikButerin, be my jolly old elf. I have already completed hundreds of transactions on the Ethereum chain, but due to one oversight, a rush, and my son’s lessons (f * COVID), I have lost all of my life savings by sending all of my funds to a non-upgradeable smartcontract. I have already done hundreds of transactions on the Ethereum chain.
— D13 (@D13Kabani) December 16, 2020
As Dawid mentioned earlier, the inability of some cryptocurrency users to reverse irreversible on-chain transactions has resulted in financial losses for them over the course of the cryptocurrency’s history. Until humanitarian aid is provided, these types of incidents frequently continue without being resolved. As an illustration, in December of the previous year, the co-founder and president of the African blockchain company Loopblock Network returned 7.8 Bitcoin, which had been sent to his wallet in error and had a value of $80,000 at the time.