Gitcoin Accidentally Sends $461,000 GTC to Unrecoverable Address

The crypto developer platform mistakenly transferred funds from the Treasury to a GTC token contract.

Gitcoin, a crowdfunding platform built on Ethereum that facilitates funding for ecosystems and open-source developers, informed the community that it had lost nearly half a million dollars’ worth of funds from its Treasury.

In a post on the platform’s governance forum, Gitcoin contributor Jonathan Miller informed the community about “an incident of misdirected funds” related to a proposal dubbed “MMM S19 Budget Request.”

“The transfer intended for the MMM’s S19 budget did not land in its multisig, and instead was sent to a GTC token contract. This has rendered the funds stuck in the contract, with no way of recovering them,” said Miller. 

He explained that the total amount of funds transferred was 521,440 GTC tokens, worth around $461,000 at current prices. The funds were sent to a GTC token contract, instead of the intended destination address – the MMM multisig wallet. 

Between the proposal’s execution date on Sept. 30 and Oct. 5, members of the project’s core team that signed off on the proposal worked to find out whether the funds could be recovered, and finally informed the Cross Stream DAO Operations that the funds were lost forever. 

The team said it intends to create safeguards to ensure that such a situation does not happen again, including listing all desired recipient wallet addresses in the proposal snapshot moving forward.

Some users were empathetic towards the situation, with one noting he was saddened that it happened but was thankful it was only a small portion of funds relative to the total Treasury. Others were not as forgiving, criticizing the team for losing such a large amount without appropriate safety checks.  

“To see an organization waste funds in such a reckless manner is disappointing. I don’t care much for ‘burned/locked’ narrative but I am concerned how multiple high-profile DAO individuals misallocated 450k which could have been avoided if even a single person exercised baseline level of due diligence,” said one user on the governance forum.