Aave DAO recently passed a proposal on March 10th that would allow users who sent tokens to an incorrect address to get them back. The proposal, called “Rescue Mission Phase 1 Long Executor,” gives developers permission to upgrade smart contracts that were mistakenly credited with tokens, so the funds can be sent back to their rightful owner automatically.
The proposed changes only apply to AAVE (AAVE), LEND, Tether (USDT), UNI (UNI) and staked AAVE (stkAAVE) tokens that were mistakenly sent to the respective token contracts, such as the AAVE token contract, the LEND token contract, the LendtoAaveMigrator or the stAAVE token contract.
The Aave DAO has granted permission to the team to start a new version of these agreements. During this initialization, the lost tokens will be immediately transferred to an AaveMerkleDistributor contract and then dispersed back to their rightful owners.
The proposal outlines that the tokens will only be accessible during the initiation of a contract, expressing “To be as unobtrusive as possible, these new implementations only contain that extra logic on their initialize() function, with the rest staying unaltered.” This appears to mean that only tokens lost in the past can be restored. Tokens sent to these addresses mistakenly in the future may not ever be retrievable unless another proposal is accepted at a later date.
ChainSafe coder Muhammad Altabba has guessed that a huge amount of tokens and ETH are stuck in the Ethereum null address (0x0) and token contracts. It’s a common occurrence for crypto users to mistakenly transfer their tokens to these contracts, like one person who lost $500,000 worth of wETH when they sent it to the wETH token contract instead of utilizing its “unwrap” feature as they had planned.
Tokens that are lost due to an un-upgradeable contract are typically not retrievable.
Cryptocurrency transactions are designed to be irreversible, so when someone tries to reverse a mistaken transfer, it can cause debate. In 2016, a system known as The DAO lost around $60 million worth of ETH due to an exploit. To undo the effects of this exploit, most Ethereum validators chose to hard fork their network; however, some refused and went on to form Ethereum Classic.
The Aave DAO’s decision to retrieve the lost tokens was not contentious, being approved by an overwhelming majority of greater than 99.9%. Only one individual voted against the motion, using a single AAVE token as their vote.
