$150 million is a lot of money – especially when it’s lost. Take the case of the missing Ethereum.
As TechCrunch noted on Tuesday (Dec. 5), this year saw Parity Technologies (which makes the wallet known as Parity) seemingly lose as much as $150 million worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
Of that tally, $90 million was from a token sale by the company’s co-founder Gavin Wood (who also is Ethereum’s core developer).
What happened? Last month, one of the users of the company’s wallet technology inadvertently deleted a library of code responsible for the wallet’s functioning.
And yet all may not be lost – at least, not literally lost. Wood, appearing at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Berlin event along with Parity CEO Jutta Steiner, walked through what happened. And in an interview with TechCrunch editor Mike Butcher, the pair said that a bug was to blame.
More specifically, as Steiner said, “a library that governs the logic of the wallets that people use had a bug, which was due to a delicate refactoring at the time when the tools weren’t yet that developed … we hadn’t figured out how to deal with bugs.” However, as the editor noted, there was knowledge of that bug well before the Ethereum-related event.
Of the frozen money, Wood stated that “it’s a long-term savings account for us right now.” Steiner said she is confident a fix is out there, and may be in place before the next update comes through in four to six months.