Cryptocurrencies: 34 million euros lost due to bad copy-paste

News hardware Cryptocurrencies: 34 million euros lost due to bad copy-paste

Bad buzz for crypto Juno

It looks like a good (or bad depending on where you are) Belgian story of our childhood, but it’s actually a funny story 2.0. The Juno blockchain, which aims to compete with big cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum in particular, would probably have done without this bad 8-digit publicity stunt.

If scams, lost passwords or forgotten passwords are commonplace in the wonderful world of cryptocurrency, the one that puts Juno on the front of the stage is quite unprecedented, especially in view of the amount lost.

At the time when the fatal error occurred, no less than 36 million dollars (i.e. 34 million euros) had somehow vanished into thin air, or rather into the clouds to stick to the sector.

A typo at 34 million euros…

At the origin of this story, you should know that the Juno blockchain is based on another blockchain called Cosmos. The principle of these blockchains is to operate on a system called “Proof of Stake” (proof of participation) that requires human validation, where Ethereum and Bitcoin, for example, work on a principle of “Proof of Work” (proof of work). Thus, with Juno, all decisions, validations, changes must be voted on and approved by the members, on a precept called “Governance on Chain”.

The Juno climbed to over €40 in March before dropping sharply to less than €9

Also note that according to its rules, it is forbidden to own more than 50,000 Juno crypto tokens. However, it was discovered that a user named Takumi Asano, had more than… 3 million, like that, quietly. In short, faced with this suspicion of massive fraud, Juno’s administrators decided to temporarily confiscate the assets of this user to submit to its members the question of the legitimacy of these tokens.

To do this, the sum had to be transferred to a wallet of the company and for this purpose, a deposit address was provided to the programmer in charge of manipulation. Except that, small problem, the sum never arrived on the intended wallet, but ended up on an address which does not belong to… nobody. The cause of this error? A simple typo, or rather a bad copy-paste…

But all may not be lost

Such an error is not supposed to be possible, because to validate a transaction on the principle of “Proof of Stake”, it had to be validated by 125 human “validators”. Problem, none of the 125 validators saw the slightest error (the address was “valid” even if it does not belong to anyone) and the transaction was therefore approved. A system that cannot happen with a traditional bank (if you make a transfer to a non-existent account, it is simply cancelled) or even with a “Proof of Work” type validation system because minors would have seen that the address was “null”.

In short, a very bad ad for the crypto Juno, even if its developers ensure that the transaction is reversible by launching a new validation within a few days.

By then, the
wallet without an owner continues its small life, we can see the 3.1 million orphan tokens for a value of approximately 26 million dollars, the price of the Juno having naturally fallen since this announcement. A good funny story 2.0 in short.