The Gitcoin developer platform has revealed that it accidentally lost about $460,000 worth of Gitcoin (GTC) tokens after they mistakenly sent these tokens to an address from which they could not be retrieved.
On October 6, the project leader, CoachJonathan, shared the details of this incident on the Gitcoin governance forum. The intention was to transfer GTC tokens from the platform’s treasury to fund a proposal for merchandise, memes, and marketing expenses.
However, rather than sending the tokens to a secure multi-signature address, they were sent to a GTC token contract.
When Funds were not received in the MMM’s multigig CoachJ informed the team about the mistake and started to look for solutions to save the funds.
CoachJonathan contacts Aditya, a key developer working on the Allo project, to investigate whether the contract includes a “withdraw” feature and whether it can be upgraded. Aditya responds that there is no such feature, but suggests verifying this information with the owner of the contract to be certain.
A total of 521,440 GTC tokens were lost in confusion, and each token was worth just under $0.90, resulting in an estimated loss of around $461,000 in dollars.
Following the transfer, the Gitcoin core developers reached out to check if the contract had a way to withdraw funds or if it could be upgraded. They confirmed that neither of these options was available, so the money has been marked as lost.
CoachJonathan stated, “This has rendered the funds stuck in the contract, with no way of recovering them.”
In response to this situation, the team has shared their intentions to prevent such a mistake from occurring in the future and to establish a more transparent system of responsibility in case another similar incident occurs.
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),” CoachJonathan concluded.
Umar Khan, a Gitcoin researcher suggested on the forum that DAO should view the lost tokens as a reduction in GTC supply rather than a loss of treasury funds.
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