$26 Million Lost in Cryptocurrencies – But Was It Really User Error or a Decade-Old ERC-20 Design Flaw?
Dive into the untold story of vulnerabilities, media reporting, and why businesses continue to choose traditional finance over blockchain.
Cryptocurrencies are complex and dangerous.
Incompetence in specific questions of declared experts
What surprised me the most was the choice of the expert community. For example, Cointelegraph reported that DefiLlama developer 0xngmi advised qklpjeth to contact Renzo directly to reissue the ezETH contract. This would be strange coming from a developer, because every developer understands the consequences of such a move. In fact, the Cointelegraph article misrepresented 0xngmi’s words.
Cointelegraph guest expert Harrison Seletsky made some general comments about the need to improve user experience. Seletsky said the incident is a wake-up call for the industry, but that bell has been ringing for years. He also added that given these potential errors, users would choose centralized organizations. This makes sense; companies will not use a financial system in which simple errors can lead to massive losses or even total loss of assets.
You could say he talked about everything and nothing at the same time.
Benzinga’s assessment struck me as even further off base. They said they reached out to qklpjeth, who reportedly told them that “staking on CEX seems safer.”
The answer is obvious.
Furthermore, as consumers of large companies' products, we must understand that the costs of using the traditional financial system are already factored into the price of the products that we ultimately pay. Therefore, we cannot rely on capital frugality to minimize its costs.
Private blockchain systems are very similar to traditional mechanisms like SWIFT, so there is no point in discussing them, especially since we, ordinary citizens, are excluded from their functions and cannot interact with them as we can with public blockchains.
Conclusion
An issue identified and detailed by Dexaran in 2017 continues to plague EVM networks to this day. Virtually all fungible tokens on EVM networks are copies of the ERC-20, meaning we have a Grand Canyon-sized vulnerability.
The EIP publishers claim that this is not a system problem but a matter of user caution, who use the system at their own risk.
What do the media do in all this? They choose the aspect of the event that has the most emotional impact, inviting experts who have nothing to do with the subject being treated. This is exactly what I criticize when I say that the media approaches the subject in a superficial and one-sided way. This harms the industry and does not help us to progress.
If you want to know more about the ERC-20 issue and how it has been under-covered for 7 years, Follow me @M-FUTURIST ALIAS YACOUBA DIARRA
