Coinbase director Conor Grogan, in a recent Twitter poster, has explained how he uncovered $322,000 worth of dormant crypto for a stranger. During the Ethereum fork of 2016, it led to the Ethereum Classic(ETC) creation. All investors that held ether on-chain received an identical ETC amount.
According to Grogan, most people have yet to touch these funds and as a result, has recovered funds in six-figure amounts for investors in the past. In a screenshot after that, he shared that he previously notified a Twitter user of 23 ETH they were unaware of.
Grogan finding the wallet owners
Grogan explained that he discovered a list of accounts that had not yet touched their ETC balances. He found 20 addresses with over $250,000 worth of crypto in the wallets. After narrowing down the list, Grogan found ways to track down the owners.
While it wasn’t easy to track down these wallets, Grogan ran into many dead ends with most of them until he reached an address with “0x475” as the prefix. The wallet has a crypto called “EOSDAC” that was airdropped to Ethereum holders in 2018. Using this information, Grogan could pinpoint the airdrop amount and the snapshot date and connect that to the holder’s EOS wallet. Hence, Grogan managed to track down the legal name of the address by poring over legal documents.
Following this connection, Grogan contacted the owner and informed them of their riches from back in the day that they had no idea existed. Optimistically, Grogan hoped that he had made the owner’s day.
In his ending statement, Grogan mentioned finding more Poloniex wallets with untouched ETC balances. He then asked Justin Sun, Tron’s founder, to send him a direct message so he could share a full list with the founder.
Coinbase working on recovering lost crypto
In an earlier report, Grogan said that users had lost 636,000 ETH, about $1.1 billion, since the creation of the ethereum network. The losses came from vulnerabilities in smart contracts, such as errors in the withdrawal functions or complete absence. However, this amount does not include forgotten wallets.
Crypto Asset Recovery data shows that 7% of presale ether wallets have never moved, showing that the ETH in the wallets has been sitting untouched since 2015, when ETH went live. Notably, the amount comes to about 521,574.608 ETH.
Lat December, Coinbase introduced a new tool to assist its users with recovering more than 4,000 unsupported ERC-20 tokens transmitted to its ledger. In the past, if you sent assets that Coinbase did not support to an exchange user’s address, you would receive a message stating that the assets had been successfully sent on-chain but did not arrive in the recipients’ wallets. Due to internal operators’ lack of access to the private keys required to roll back transactions, these assets are typically irrecoverable. Using the feature, customers must supply both the contract address of the lost asset and their Ethereum transaction identity for the lost assets to receive their money back.
Another feature, the “account abstraction” feature, was implemented earlier on the Ethereum blockchain. The feature improved the network and made it simpler for users to reclaim their cryptocurrency if they misplaced their wallet’s private keys. Therefore, making it simpler for owners of ETH wallets to recover their assets if they misplace their private keys.
