Millions of dollars worth of tokens remain unclaimed in cross-chain bridged contracts. Arkham Intelligence experts came to this conclusion, writes The Block.
Experts have discovered several similar addresses that belong to major players in the DeFi and NFT space, as well as presumably Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
“There are dozens of accounts with six to seven figure sums, […] which were forgotten. If you are on this list, you may have lost several million dollars.” analysts wrote.
Among the examples mentioned — wallet from ENS thomasg.eth, with ~$800,000 in the Arbitrum bridge contract. For almost two years now the funds have remained idle.
The Ethereum address associated with Bofur Capital stores about 27 WBTC ($1.8 million), which also have not moved from the Arbitrum bridge for more than two years. According to Arkham, the wallet contains more than $14 million in assets.
Another address associated with Mike MacDonald’s X account may have “forgotten” about $117,000 raised through the sale of CryptoPunks.
The publication suggested that such a case suggests that large cryptocurrency holders may face similar problems when tracking assets when they are transferred across different blockchains.
Another wallet may be linked to Buterin. The Ethereum co-founder sent 50 ETH ($1.05 million) to an address whose owner had not moved it from the Optimism Bridge in seven months.
“Vitalik, if you own this wallet: you have a million dollars in ETH,” — experts wrote.
Journalists explained that unlike cross-chain bridges like Hop, where users automatically receive their funds on another network, in a number of other cases there may be scenarios where they have to manually request assets.
If the user forgets to do this, the smart contract has no way to remind him of this. As a result, situations are possible when cryptocurrencies remain unclaimed.
Recall that in 2022, Buterin called cross-chain bridges vulnerable to 51% attacks.
Previously, the Ethereum co-founder used the Railgun mixer, which is also used by North Korean hackers Lazarus Group, and emphasized that “this is normal.”
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