DeFi Exchange Compound Sends Out $90 Million to Users by Accident

After an update to the platform software that handles user transactions, decentralized finance platform Compound mistakenly dished out about $90 million in crypto tokens to a portion of its userbase. The incident was the result of a mistake in the code and had nothing to do with interference on part of malicious actors.

The company's founder, Robert Leshner, decided to use Twitter as the platform of choice to make an appeal to any users who received the mistakenly sent tokens. However, the tweet and more specifically the wording he chose, created a bit of a stir in the Compound community.

Even though the tweet started with a plea to return incorrectly received tokens, even offering a 10 percent cut to anyone who returns the tokens as a sort of a "white-hat" incentive, the same tweet went on using very different language. The full tweet goes as follows:

"If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error:

Please return it to the Compound Timelock (0x6d903f6003cca6255D85CcA4D3B5E5146dC33925). Keep 10% as a white-hat.

Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed."

It is very easy to imagine why putting the IRS and users being doxxed in the same sentence was not a very popular sentiment with Compound users. Some were outraged by the suggestion to bring in the IRS, as according to them crypto was originally conceived as an antithesis of federal financial institutions. Others came out with biting words and even some profanity, whipped into an outrage just by seeing the word "doxxed" in the tweet.

Leshner did come out with a number of subsequent tweets, explaining that the original post was taken out of context.

It's also not too difficult to imagine that the 13 percent value slump of Compound's COMP token was caused by the aftershocks of that original tweet. A significant portion of the misallocated crypto has already been returned to Compound, but there are still some 183 thousand that are still with users. The dollar value of the tokens amounts to just shy of $59 million, using the COMP price as of October 5.

October 6, 2021
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