Last week’s Juno Proposal 20 canceled tokens from Takumi Asano, a Japanese investor accused of gaming the Juno airdrop for $120 million in February. It was the first major example of a blockchain community voting to change a single user’s token balance.
According to the community vote, Asano managed an exchange service, disqualifying his wallets from the Juno “stake drop,” which distributed JUNO tokens to Cosmos Hub blockchain stakers.
Last week’s vote was supposed to automatically run code shifting the seized cash from Asano’s wallet into a “Unity” address managed by the Juno network.
But things went awry. On Wednesday, an error in the code moved 3 million revoked JUNO tokens to an address on the blockchain that neither Asano nor the Juno community has access to.
As one of JUNO’s founders, Andrea Di Michele provided an explanation for what happened. He stated that when he gave developers a smart contract’s address and transaction hash, he pasted both of them together. When he did not specify the transaction hash. This resulted in the smart contract address and the transaction hash being interchanged.
?Was Unity Software Upgrade really Successful??
The upgrade caused an incident.
The targeted JUNO was NOT moved to the unity contract address, but moved to an unknown address LoL.https://t.co/ofBm7jmHeC
— Takumi Asano (????)| GAME ?? | Juno Whale?? (@takumiasano_jp) May 5, 2022
When developers copied the transaction hash, they actually copied the wallet address, not the transaction hash, Di Michele claims. As a result, the seized funds were relocated to a part of the Juno blockchain that was inaccessible to anyone!
Surprisingly, none of JUNO’s 125 validators noticed that the Unity address had been pasted wrong. Validators must verify each transaction, which is encoded in a “block,” before it can be included in the chain.
Can it be Recovered?
Reversing transactions has been attempted in the past by developers, but the methods were not simple. Because JUNO is a Proof-of-Stake chain, engineers may have an easier time fixing the issue. JUNO uses a governance model where token holders can vote to change blockchain transactions, and a majority vote and a software update may be required to change the direction of the project.
A fix may be in place, but it will take at least a week, according to reports.
While the Cosmos blockchain community has backed Juno, this is another setback for the project this year. In April, the chain went offline for several days after a suspicious smart contract assault revoked Asano’s tokens in March. The JUNO token price has fallen from a peak of over $40 to $11.41 in the last two months.
Steps You can take to Avoid Losing Crypto Funds
Safeguarding Your keys
Blockchain technology, built on a distributed LEDGER technology, provides high levels of protection for digital assets without a centralized custodian. Keeping the cryptographic keys to your digital asset wallet safe is an important component of protecting your digital assets.
Storing Coins in Hard Wallets
For investors, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are perhaps the simplest option. However, unlike banks, these exchanges do not provide you access to the tokens’ wallets. While the user owns the currencies kept on the platform, the exchange holds them, making them vulnerable to platform assaults and developer errors, as seen in the above case. A user must store their coins in a hard wallet also.
Holding Seed Phrase
Your seed phrase contains up to 24 randomly generated words in a certain order. This is used to generate a private key for your crypto wallet. It can be used to produce private keys and access cryptocurrency if you ever lose your wallet. So, it is the most important thing to hold if you lose your wallet.
Verifying Crypto Addresses
Investors should be cautious when transmitting digital assets to another person or wallet, as the erroneous address renders them unrecoverable. This error occurs when the sender enters the wallet address carelessly. Unlike traditional transactions, blockchain transactions are irrevocable.
Current prices:
Juno blockchain uses the Cosmos ATOM/USD ecosystem. As of writing, JUNOS was trading at $11.51, down 9.37% over the last 24 hours, and COSMOS was trading at $17.41, down by 3.25%. Bitcoin BTC/USD is trading at $35.780, a three-month low.
