All in all, this customer is actually pretty lucky as far as erroneous transfers go. FTX's bankruptcy team still has access to FTX wallets, and are still actively working on recovering and disbursing assets to creditors. In some cases in the crypto world, erroneous transfers are lost forever.
Trader accidentally sends 2,000 SOL to bankrupt FTX
A former FTX customer made an expensive mistake in October 2023 when he transferred 2,000 SOL (~$64,000 at the time, almost $400,000 today) to an old FTX account, about a year after the company went bankrupt. Unlike you might expect with an attempt to wire traditional funds to a bank account that's been closed, the funds didn't bounce back. Instead, they've been sitting around under control of the FTX bankruptcy estate, requiring the former customer to seek a court order to get his funds back.
Newly freed Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht appears to squander $12 million in potential memecoin profits
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road darknet market place, earned a presidential pardon on January 21 as an apparent thank you by President Trump to the Libertarian Party. When fans created a token called $ROSS to celebrate his release, they sent a substantial number of the tokens — 50% of the supply — to donation wallets that his family have operated for years, used to raise money to campaign for his release.
It's not clear whether Ulbricht has taken over control of these wallets, or if they are still being operated on his behalf. Either way, whoever does control the wallets made a big mistake when they tried to cash out on their memecoin stash by adding single-sided liquidity on Meteora. They accidentally initialized the liquidity pool at too low a price, allowing a MEV bot to snap up 5% of the token supply (notionally ~$1.5 million) at a discount and resell them.
The wallet operator then made the same error again with a larger quantity of tokens, selling off another 35% of the supply and losing out on around $10.5 million in notional value.
"On-chain Microstrategy" clone Ether Strategy loses over $500,000 of ETH
A Ethereum-based project promising to duplicate the bitcoin leveraged investment strategy used by MicroStrategy has announced that, prior to even launching, 165 ETH (~$535,850) was lost when a misconfiguration in the project interface resulted in tokens being sent to the wrong address. The project appears to have determined that those tokens are irrecoverably lost, because they announced that they had contributed 165 ETH of their own to reimburse users for their costly mistake.
Australian Open apparently scraps its NFT project
Holders of any of the several thousand "AO ArtBall" NFTs may be disappointed as the Australian Open appears to have abandoned the project aimed at tennis fans. The first NFTs originally sold for 0.067 ETH (~$275 at the time), and another round were minted for 0.23 ETH (~$450 at the time). However, the sale prices of the NFTs have steadily dwindled since early 2023, and recent sales have been for 0.003 to 0.0075 ETH (~$10–$25).
Buyers were told they could use the NFTs as a sort of fan pass, receiving access to a Discord, and earning ground passes and behind-the-scenes access for finals weeks. There was also a scheme in which NFT holders could redeem access to passes to matches.
However, the Australian Open seems to have let the project — launched at the peak of NFT hype — peter out, with no mention of redeeming passes, and project websites still promising a 2024 update. The Discord has been shut down.
Trader reveals he lost $28 million to bad copy-paste
After apparently exhausting all his other options, a trader has put out a call to "all skilled hackers and white hats out there" to help him recover 7,912 Renzo staked ETH (ezETH) he inadvertently sent to an inaccessible address back in June. The tokens were priced at a little over $28 million at the time, and are currently priced at a little less than $26 million. According to the trader, he copied the wrong address to his clipboard before making the trade, which rendered his funds permanently inaccessible.
Short of finding a vulnerability in Renzo, the trader's only real choice is to plead with Renzo to change their smart contract in such a way as to release the funds. While this is technically possible, Renzo has told the trader they could not grant his request due to "regulatory limitations".
Lacoste quietly ditches its "UNDW3" project
Lacoste abruptly shutdown the website, Discord, and Twitter account belonging to "UNDW3", its NFT project. Lacoste launched its original collection of NFTs in June 2022, selling 11,212 of the tokens for 0.08 ETH (~$93 at the time). Lacoste made around $1 million off the mint, plus earnings from fees on secondary sales. Later announcements promised holders of the NFTs that they could participate in raffles to earn real-life merchandise and "digital twins". They were also promised a say in the future direction of the brand.
However, that's vanished as the project was closed without any acknowledgement. People still have their NFTs, but can no longer earn benefits from Lacoste. Meanwhile, resale prices have dwindled to around 0.004 ETH (~$13). Angry token holders have accused Lacoste of a "soft rug pull".
Perhaps naming your crypto project "underwater" was an ill omen.
Kujira token tanks as team's leveraged bets melt down
The team behind the Kujira project wound up with around $2 million in bad debt after taking some of their operational funds and using it to make leveraged bets on their own platform. They blamed "a series of events over the last few months, including exploits, socially engineered attacks and fallouts within the ecosystem" for causing the positions to be liquidated. The $KUJI token price crashed by more than 60% as a result of the team's poor risk management.
The Kujira team apologized for the fiasco, and announced a plan to create a DAO to take over the project treasury.
Blockchain developer loses over $48,000 after posting private key to Github
A blockchain developer posted on Twitter that he had lost almost $50,000 after his cryptocurrency wallet was drained. He explained that he had been working on a software project on Github in a private repository that contained his wallet's private key. In order to apply for a funding grant from the Optimism project, he had to make the repository public. However, he forgot that the secret key was in the repository.
Generally, it is very bad practice to store sensitive secrets in Github, even when projects are set to private.
"Got drained of everything," he wrote on Twitter. A commenter asked how long it took for the attacker to steal the money after the private key became publicly visible. "2 min", he replied.
Someone accidentally burns $1.36 million Tether
Someone accidentally threw away $1.36 million when they accidentally sent Tethers to the Tether contract address — making them permanently inaccessible in a process known as "burning". This is a rather common phenomenon in crypto, where it's easy to accidentally copy/paste the wrong address.
Most experienced crypto users have adopted the habit of sending small test transactions before transferring large amounts of tokens, to first check that they're using the correct address. Oddly, this person did so in this case, but then went right ahead and transferred the remaining tokens to the erroneous address.
The person may have lucked out that they were using a centralized stablecoin like Tether, whose operators hold a substantial amount of control over freezing, destroying, and creating new Tethers — and could feasibly replace the burned tokens.
Euler Finance cofounder loses private key and, with it, $3.8 million
As Euler Finance tried to recover from a massive hack in March 2023, and as founder co-founder Michael Bentley was dealing with matters in his personal life, he "made an error and it turns out that one of the private keys [to his personal crypto wallet] is no longer recoverable". The private key would have allowed him to recover assets from his hardware wallet, which had made his assets inaccessible after a malfunction.
With the malfunctioning hardware wallet and no recovery key, Bentley has lost access to assets including 1.2 million EUL tokens — over 4% of the total EUL token supply. These tokens are priced at about $3.8 million today, though at other times the tokens would have been worth up to about $15 million.
"I've now lost a substantial percentage of the crypto assets I held in cold storage, accumulated over more than seven years, including the majority of the EUL allocated to me for participating in Euler governance," said Bentley.