Gitcoin screws up transfer, sends $460K to unrecoverable address

Gitcoin’s project lead said the snafu has resulted in nearly half a million in funds being forever locked in a one-way contract address.

Crypto developer platform Gitcoin has admitted to losing approximately $460,000 of Gitcoin (GTC) tokens after mistakenly sending the funds to an unrecoverable contract address.

On Oct. 6, project lead “CoachJonathan” posted details of the incident on the Gitcoin governance forum. He said the transfer of GTC from the treasury was intended for a merchandise, memes, and marketing budget proposal.

However, rather than going to a multisignature address, it instead went to a GTC token contract instead.

“This has rendered the funds stuck in the contract, with no way of recovering them,” he lamented.

A total of 521,440 GTC tokens were lost in the snafu. The coin was trading at just below $0.90 at the time, making the dollar loss an estimated $461,000.

Following the transfer, Gitcoin core developers were contacted to explore whether the contract has a withdraw function or was upgradeable. It was confirmed that neither was an option, so the funds have been flagged as lost.

In light of the incident, the team has shared plans to ensure such an error never happens again and create clearer accountability if there is another incident.

“Large token holders and multisig signers have a responsibility to be extra diligent when it comes to handling funds that do not belong to them (myself included),” he concluded.

Gitcoin researcher Umar Khan commented on the forum that the DAO could consider the lost tokens a reduction in GTC supply rather than a loss of treasury funds.

Observers said “Crypto UX is sadly really broken if this can happen,”

It seems that @gitcoin mistakenly sent ~521k $GTC (~$471k) to the token address instead of funding a workstream address

That is really sad to see. Effectively burning half a million $

How come none of the voter/signer noticed? Crypto UX is sadly really broken if this can happen pic.twitter.com/DhI7lPaViY

— Lefteris Karapetsas | Hiring for @rotkiapp (@LefterisJP) October 7, 2023

Gitcoin is a platform to fund Web3 builders looking for open-source work. Project owners and developers can publish their projects while donors can browse a list of projects and choose what they would like to fund.

The price of GTC has fallen 1.1% over the past 24 hours and was trading at $0.889 at the time of writing. Moreover, the token is down a whopping 99% since its May 2021 all-time high of $89.62, according to CoinGecko.

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