According to Cointelegraph: The State Treasurer of Maine is showing interest in handling cryptocurrency that has been lost or abandoned. Currently, the state holds more than $328 million in unclaimed property, according to official data.
A report from the Office of the Maine State Treasurer has raised concerns about the state's readiness to deal with cryptocurrencies. The report states: “Our office does not currently handle cryptocurrency, but programs like Unclaimed Property may need to start addressing the situation of abandoned cryptocurrency accounts.”
Furthermore, the report also discloses the state treasurer’s interest in introducing reforms concerning emerging issues such as technology, automated clearing house (ACH) payments, and cryptocurrencies. It suggests, "While our current statutes and precedent elsewhere leave us without clear authority to hold our recovered crypto assets, we may want to do so in the future."
Abandoned cryptocurrencies are not a novel issue and have been prevalent even in the Ethereum ecosystem. An Ether (ETH) presale event in the summer of 2014 saw 8,893 participants, and yet, nearly a decade later, millions of dollars in ETH remain untouched in the presale wallets.
Recently, controversy arose as the Maine Democratic Party refused to return a donation of $100,000 received from Sam Bankman-Fried, following the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York's call for political committees to return donations received from FTX after yielding seven guilty verdicts in the FTX-SBF case.
One approach to recovering lost or abandoned cryptocurrencies is through the tool launched by Coinbase last year. The recovery tool can manipulate unsupported ERC-20 tokens sent erroneously to the exchange’s address, directing assets from an inbound address to a self-custodial wallet. It does not require the exposure of private keys at any point.
By providing the Ethereum TXID for the transaction where the asset was lost and the contract address of the lost asset, Coinbase's tool contributes to recovering lost funds, countering the growth pile of unclaimed cryptocurrencies.
