Crypto Platform Compound Mistakenly Hands Out $90 Million to Users

Following an upgrade that did not go according to plan, decentralized finance platform and crypto exchange Compound sent out around $90 million in crypto tokens to some of its users. The bug was triggered while Compound was updating its platform, more specifically the parts that take care of user transactions.

In an effort to reach out to its users and attempt to persuade them to return the mistakenly allocated funds, however, Compound seems to have caused more drama and harm than good. Compound founder, Robert Leshner, went on Twitter and made a post that, within the span of just three sentences, managed to both sweet-talk and threaten anyone who received mistakenly sent tokens.

The controversial post in full reads as follows:

"If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error:
Please return it to the Compound Timelock (0x6d903f6003cca6255D85CcA4D3B5E5146dC33925). Keep 10% as a white-hat.
Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed."

Obviously, a lot of people interpreted this as a very serious threat on part of Compound to actually doxx its users. Leshner later returned with more explanatory posts, trying to clean up his wording and explain that it was all a misunderstanding, and his original tweet was "taken out of context". How much that did to help appease those angered by the original post remains to be seen.

Users responded passionately to the original tweet, often using some words that are not very nice. Others were also outraged that the post suggested cooperation with federal authorities - the opposite of what some users thought crypto was meant to stand for.

Within a single day from the unfortunate original tweet, COMP - the native currency token used by the Compound platform, had dropped in value some 13 percent, as reported by ThreatPost.

A chunk of the crypto tokens has already been returned to Compound, but more than half, or about 180 thousand tokens are still not back where they belong. This would equal just under $90 million, using the price of COMP as of October 5.