Involuntary giveaway of funds is a subsequent problem in crypto. For “not so much” funds, most senders can look the other way. However, when we are talking about crypto assets worth millions of dollars, then it is hard to forgo. Compound Labs is a new victim of an accidental $90M giveaway to its users due to a bug during an upgrade. For such a large amount of funds, it is hard for the platform to overlook it. The founder of compound has reached out to the community begging that all users that received the funds return it and they can decide to keep 10% of the funds.
Compound is a popular decentralized finance staking protocol. The platform allows investors and borrowers to exchange assets, eliminating the middle-man charges as with traditional finance. Compound labs experienced the unfortunate event during an upgrade to the comptroller contract on Wednesday. The upgrade contained a one-character bug that allow community members to claim more COMP than allowed. The CEO, Robert Leshner, admitted that the team noticed the bug but no administrative control was put in place to block the faulty update. As it stands, some Compound Labs community users have been lucky to have received funds more than they left in their wallets.
The CEO took to Twitter on Thursday to plead with users to return the extra funds they received and keep 10% of it. For those who will not return the funds, he threatened to “report as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed.” One of the community users allegedly claims they received approximately $20M COMP. While some users have returned the siphoned funds, the platform is still expecting other lucky users to do the same. If you woke up with extra millions of dollars in your crypto wallet, would you return it to the sender?