$ 89million in crypto was mistakenly sent to users of a decentralized financial platform, and now its CEO is asking users to voluntarily return it

• Users of the DeFi Compound lending platform mistakenly received $ 89 million in cryptocurrency.

• A problem in a recent platform update caused some users to receive too many “COMP”.

• “This is the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk for a decentralized protocol,” tweeted the CEO of Compound.

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An issue in an update this week to the decentralized financial platform Compound led to the accidental sending of a cryptocurrency valued at around $ 89 million called COMP to users.

Now the CEO is asking users to voluntarily return the funds.

“If you received an incorrect large amount of COMP from the Compound Protocol Error: Please resend it to the Compound Timelock.” Robert Leshner tweeted. He also threatened to report to the Internal Revenue Service anyone who hadn’t and then apologized for the “pissed off tweet.” Compound and Leshner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Compound allows users to lend their crypto assets and earn interest, and the platform is governed by computer code protocols that are voted on by the community and go through a seven-day governance process.

The platform is not hosted or managed by the company, but through a distributed network of users. As such, there are no admin controls or other tools for the company to stop or reverse the distribution of digital tokens, Leshner tweeted.

“This is the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk for a decentralized protocol – that an open development process allows a bug to go into production,” he wrote.

On Friday afternoon, Leshner thanked two users for “giving COMP back to the community”.

“This is not an event that calls into question whether DeFi can be used safely. It is a red flag for decentralized, community-managed protocols to improve the processes by which changes are introduced,” a Leshner told Bloomberg, calling for a longer review process. and more community developers looking for errors.

The story continues

Still, financial policy analyst and crypto critic Andrew Park told Bloomberg that incidents like this undermine investor confidence in decentralized funding schemes.

“There are reasons to criticize the existing banking system, but there are a lot of safeguards in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening,” Park said. “If I have my money in Compound, how confident will I be in this system now? “

Earlier this week, a crypto exchange accidentally paid $ 24 million in fees to send just $ 100,000 to the ethereum network, in one of the biggest “big finger” mistakes in digital asset history.

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