As a result of bugs and user errors, users have permanently lost access to 636,000 ETH (~$1.15 billion) since the network’s launch, according to Coinbase director Conor Grogan.
I’ve categorized thousands of instances of Ethereum typos, user errors, and buggy contracts
Thus far I’ve found 636,000 ETH worth $1.15B+ that are lost forever: 0.5% of all circulating supply
Crypto can be hard some times ?
On the flip side thats a lot of ETH that cant be sold pic.twitter.com/YvCh2KmME5— Conor (@jconorgrogan) March 20, 2023
“I’ve categorized thousands of typos, human errors, and buggy smart contracts,” he wrote.
Grogan noted that the amount corresponds to 0.5% of the circulating Ether.
The researcher highlighted some of the most high-profile incidents to date:
- 306,000 ETH were trapped due to the Parity Multisig bug in the wallet contract;
- QuadrigaCX, which went under after a $137 million loss, lost 60,000 ETH due to a faulty contract;
- AkuDreams NFT project froze 11,500 ETH permanently due to a bug in the token-minting smart contract.
Users also sent a total of 24,000 ETH to a burn address for unknown reasons, Grogan added.
Some of the biggest losses:
-Web3 foundation has 306K ETH ($538M) trapped due to the Parity Multisig bug
-Quadriga lost 60K ($108M) to a faulty contract
-Akutars lost 11.5k ETH in an NFT-mint gone wrong
-People have collectively sent 24k ETH to a burn address for some reason (?) pic.twitter.com/ELAzFTvWe5— Conor (@jconorgrogan) March 20, 2023
He stressed that more than $1.1 billion is a very conservative estimate of the ETH actually lost.
“The study simply covers all cases where cryptocurrency ended up permanently blocked. It does not, for instance, cover lost private keys or things like wallets that are presumably forgotten, such as Genesis,” he clarified.
Earlier, Parity Technologies, the developer of Parity, lobbied for an Ethereum hard fork to unlock the funds.