Over the weekend, a user accidentally transferred 1 million Tether (USDT) to Swerve’s contract, resulting in the loss of the funds, although they were later recovered.
Swerve Discord is savage tonight. Some guy just sent $1 million to the Swerve token contract and LOST IT ALL.
DeFi ain't for the faint of heart. pic.twitter.com/s1OO84i3dI
— Platonic NEET (@Crypto_Plato) September 8, 2020
Some time ago, another user made a similar mistake and lost $400,000.
The problem was not caused by bugs, but by human error or perhaps, especially in the second case, by a lack of understanding of crypto platforms around which there is still little expertise.
Anyway, the CTO of Bitfinex and Tether, Paolo Ardoino, promptly wrote a message to the unfortunate user telling him to open a ticket to the support service so a solution could be found in case they were ERC20 USDT tokens.
Please open a ticket to @Tether_to support service https://t.co/1Yx0v0myL1
If it's USDt ERC20 stuck in an address we should be able to recover it, but in order to be sure, please contact our customer support and we'll try our best. https://t.co/B3KuRDYsVK— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) September 8, 2020
A few days later Ardoino himself confirmed that the funds had been recovered and sent to the legitimate owner.
The amount involved, we repeat, was as much as 1 million USDT.
How were the lost Tether recovered
Obviously, such a thing was only possible thanks to the existence of a centralized system with which it was possible to create or destroy the amount.
This is certainly an advantage considering that in this case, it allowed the recovery of lost funds.
This was a case with a happy ending, despite the fact that there were many users who complained under the posts as they now want to be treated in the same way and recover lost funds, asking what the minimum threshold is for the team to take action.
Usually it takes us couple of weeks max
— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) September 8, 2020
As Ardoino himself explained, this procedure usually takes several weeks, but in this case, it only took a couple of days.
This opens the scenario to something revolutionary in the DeFi world because using USDT could provide guarantees as funds cannot be lost or stolen.
Imagine, for example, if funds were stolen from a pool or from a DeFi protocol that has several million USDT. At that point, it would be entirely legitimate to think that users could ask Tether to recover the missing funds and blacklist the address with the stolen assets.
