Users accidentally get $90 million from Compound DeFi bug, founder pleads for return
Late Thursday, Robert Leshner, pleaded with customers on Compound, a decentralized-finance (DeFi) staking protocol, to return the tokens that they had accidentally got due to a bug in the system. He also issued a threat but walked back on it. According to CNBC Compound’s native token, comp, initially fell by 13 percent but soon recovered.
Robert Leshner began tweeting late Thursday asking customers to return comp if they got big and incorrect amounts of the token from the Compound protocol error.
He added that they could keep 10 percent of the receipts as a white-hat or else it would be reported to the tax authorities and many of the customers would be doxxed.
He later went back on his earlier comment of doxxing and called it a “bone-headed tweet/approach.” He also added that he appreciated their ridicule and support as he tried to get some of the company’s comp back.
Matt Greenspan, portfolio manager and founder of Quantum Economics told CNBC that doxxing customers was the worst thing that a crypto company could do “from a PR perspective.”
What is doxxing?
Doxxing a person means making private information public. It is considered to be self destructive behavior in the crypto world.
Protocol users said that they obtained huge windfalls. A customer said that they received $29 million worth of comp tokens in a single transaction. Another one said that they got 70 million comp tokens which has an approximate value of $20.8 million when they posted the receipt.
Blockchain security researcher Mudit Gupta told CNBC that in the past when Alchemix exchange lost about 4.8 million, they recovered most of it as people returned the reward tokens that they had accidentally obtained due to a glitch. Although he said that a person could not be sure, he was hopeful that Compound will regain most of the native tokens it lost due to a DeFi bug.
What is a DeFi protocol?
A decentralized finance or DeFi protocol allows investors to directly trade with each other, whereas in a crypto exchange, assets are exchanged for other types of assets for example cryptos are traded for fiat currency. Compound is a popular DeFi protocol.
Source CNBC, Futurism website
