A million JUNO tokens went down the drain, but there is still hope.
This week, a cryptocurrency developer made a tremendous error when he sent several million dollars worth of tokens to a bad inaccessible profile. The sad story, according to CoinDesk, took effect on the Juno project team amid an epic community governance protocol.
But this phenomenon takes place long before the loss of this 30 million dollars. The situation dates back to a historic decision made by the Cosmos (ATOM)-based blockchain project Juno community to seize a vast sum of project-native JUNO tokens from a whale that received accusations of manipulating an airdrop for a total of USD 120 million.
A Particular Story about Blockchain Governance
In February, shortly after the release of the Juno blockchain, to attract users of the Cosmos ecosystem to the new network, the Juno team executed an airdrop that would split 1 JUNO token between each wallet with one staked ATOM token.
However, the program seems to ignore that there could be whales, users with a large volume of digital assets, with several wallets with ATOM staked.
While the airdrop got designed with a limit of 50,000 JUNO per wallet, that did not prevent a guy named Takumi Asano, who had 50 staked ATOM wallets, from claiming a massive amount corresponding to 10% of the total supply of JUNO tokens.
Asano got accused shortly after of maliciously maneuvering to claim more tokens than the airdrop allowed. Fearing that a single individual would have access to such an amount of tokens, and thus gain the possibility to handle the JUNO market, the community submitted a governance proposal to revoke the permits from Asano.
Many proposals appeared about the movement to steal the user’s tokens, as CoinDesk points out in a series of studies. One of the proposals expressed that Asano represented an investment group in Japan named CCN and was therefore ineligible for the airdrop protocol.
The Tremendous Mistake
Words more, words less, the day of the vote finally arrived last Friday, after several months of dispute, and the majority of the community voted to seize every Asano’s coins, except for 50,000 tokens.
According to CoinDesk, the movement has epic dimensions. It marks the first time a Blockchain group has gathered votes to revoke a user’s allegedly ill-gotten gains, a case reminiscent of what happened in 2016 after the attack on DAO on Ethereum.
As a result of approval by more than 70% of voters, the proposal would execute an automatic update on the Juno blockchain to migrate revoked funds to a smart contract controlled by a community. The Juno community could then vote on what to do with the tokens.
In a series of events, the developer leading the decision sent the tokens to an alphanumeric address that represented the transaction hash, all by accident, instead of the rightful wallet address. A Juno developer interviewed by CoinDesk expressed that this situation took effect due to a copy-paste bug.
As a result, when the code got applied to run this week, a programming error went to migrate 3 million JUNO tokens, worth $36 million, to a wrong address on the blockchain where no one, not Asano or the community, can access.
By: Jenson Nuñez
