Juno accidentally transfers $36 million in seized funds to inaccessible wallet address

A protracted discussion and two different votes ended with the Juno project deciding to confiscate all but 50,000 of the 3 million $JUNO accumulated by one individual. When the discussions began, the 2.95 million $JUNO to be confiscated were worth a combined $121 million. However, the $JUNO price has dropped from the then all-time-high of around $40 to under $13, putting the value of the tokens to be confiscated closer to $38 million.

Juno intended to transfer the seized tokens from the individual whale's wallet to a community-controlled wallet. However, the person making the transfer accidentally copied and pasted the wrong value, resulting in the funds being sent to a wallet address that no one can access — effectively burning the tokens.

Daniel Hwang, who helps run one of the Juno validators, said to CoinDesk, "We fucked up big time". He also offered an unusual opinion: "Validators should have due diligenced for ourselves to actually check the code we're executing and running".

Shortly after the botched transaction, the Juno community began voting on a proposal to hard fork a second time to fix their mistake.

Juno whale threatens to sue network validators if community confiscates his tokens

The Juno community has officially voted to confiscate over 2.95 million $JUNO owned by one whale who they believe gamed the airdrop to obtain more than his fair share. This follows a long community discussion about his actions, and formalized a previous community poll on what to do. When the discussions began, the 2.95 million $JUNO to potentially be confiscated were worth a combined $121 million. However, the $JUNO price has dropped from the then all-time-high of around $40 to $11.30, putting the value of the tokens to be confiscated closer to $33 million.

The whale has repeatedly appealed to the community not to revoke his tokens, even trying to claim that the Juno developers had been secretly selling off $JUNO and damaging the community. Unfortunately for him, he didn't succeed in swaying the community, who voted on April 29 to confiscate his tokens.

The whale has threatened to take "legal action against each validator" if the community burns or locks the tokens that previously belonged to him, and which he claims to have been managing on behalf of clients in an investment scheme.

After someone games the system to acquire a disproportionate amount of airdropped tokens valued at $123 million, Juno community begins a vote to take them away

A blockchain protocol called Juno launched in October 2021, airdropping their $JUNO tokens to members of the Cosmos ecosystem in proportion to how many $ATOM tokens they held. The protocol agreed via community vote that they would cap the amount given to a single individual at 50,000 $JUNO to "ensure fair distribution across the network". However, there is no restriction that one individual only have one crypto wallet, and so one single whale ended up receiving more than 3.1 million $JUNO across tens of wallets, which they later consolidated into one. Because of the enormous value centralized in one wallet — equivalent to around $123 million — if the whale sold off their $JUNO they could wipe out liquidity on decentralized exchanges and tank the price of the token. They could also perform a 51% attack on the network, as they already have half of quorum.

On March 10, a community proposal was submitted, proposing to take away the majority of the whale's tokens (worth around $121 million), and leave them with the 50,000 $JUNO (a little below $2 million) that was originally intended to be the maximum per person. The vote passed, in a major blow to an ecosystem where "your keys, your coins" is taken as gospel — that is, if you control the keys to a wallet, your assets supposedly can't be taken from you.

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