At least 0.5% of Ethereum tokens have been lost during the existence of the cryptocurrency — study

According to Conor Grogan, Director of Strategy and Business Operations at Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, cryptocurrency community members who support Ethereum have lost 636,000 ETH (0.5% of all tokens), which is about $ 1.15 billion at the time of publication. Grogan argued the data with a number of theses, including errors and bugs in the Ethereum network.

According to Grogan’s Twitter post, the biggest losses were incurred by users due to a bug in the Parity crypto wallet — investors lost 306,000 ETH. And due to a bug in the smart contract of the Quadriga cryptocurrency exchange (now out of business and its founder has died), users lost 60,000 ETH.

I've categorized thousands of instances of Ethereum typos, user errors, and buggy contracts

Thus far I've found 636,000 ETH worth $ 1.15B+ that are lost forever: 0.5% of all circulating supply

Crypto can be hard some times 😅
On the flip side thats a lot of ETH that cant be sold pic.twitter.com/YvCh2KmME5

— Conor (@jconorgrogan) March 20, 2023

«It is worth noting that the figure of over $ 1 billion is much lower than the actual amount of Ethereum coins lost. For example, it does not include assets that cannot be accessed due to lost keys ,» Grogan emphasized and estimated that the lost funds that are known to be lost are equal to 0.5% of the number of Ethereum coins in circulation. For comparison, the number of BTC tokens that have not been used for more than 6 months has reached 14.9 million, which is estimated at $ 421 billion at the current rate. According to analysts, the number of BTC tokens that are hibernating is 73% of all bitcoins.

It is worth noting that Coinbase has recently conducted a test for ChatGPT to analyze the security of ERC-20 tokens. Although the algorithm did not meet expectations, Coinbase noted that the chatbot «shows potential.» Coinbase compared the results of ChatGPT’s analysis with the results of its internal team that checks blockchain projects. In total, the company compared 20 risk assessments of smart contracts from ChatGPT and humans. In 60% of cases, ChatGPT’s results coincided with the assessments from the crypto exchange’s staff. However, in 40% of cases, the chatbot called risky tokens reliable.