Some Aave users who accidentally sent tokens to the wrong address may soon be able to get them back, according to the text of a proposal passed by the Aave decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) on March 10. The proposal, titled “Rescue Mission Phase 1 Long” Executor,” empowers Aave developers to upgrade smart contracts that have mis-sent tokens in the past, causing the contract to automatically send the missing tokens back to their original owners.
Confirmed proposal only affects missing AAVE (AAVE), LEND, Tether (USDT), UNI (UNI) and staked AAVE (stkAAVE) tokens that were mistakenly sent to the AAVE token contract, LEND token contract, LendtoAaveMigrator or stAAVE token contract.
It further empowers teams to initialize a new implementation for these contracts. Aave DAO said that during initialization, lost tokens will be automatically sent to a separate AaveMerkleDistributor contract, and then they will be sent to the owner.
The text of the proposal emphasizes that these tokens will only be transferred during the initialization phase of the contract, stating: "In order to be as intrusive as possible, these new implementations only include additional logic in their initialize() function, everything else remains the same" This seems to mean that only past lost tokens can be recovered. Future tokens erroneously sent to these addresses may be permanently lost unless a new proposal is passed in the future.
Losing tokens by mistakenly transferring tokens to token contracts is a common problem in the crypto community. ChainSafe developer Muhammad Altabba estimates hundreds of millions worth of tokens and ether. Locked in Ethereum empty address (0x0) and token contract. An Ethereum user lost over $500,000 worth of wrapped Ether (wETH) by transferring over $500,000 worth of wrapped Ether (wETH) to the wETH token contract instead of calling its "unwrap" function as they intended ( wETH).
Tokens lost in this way are generally irrecoverable if the contract cannot be upgraded.
By their very nature, encrypted transmissions should be immutable. So even though erroneous transfers can be reversed, attempts to do so are sometimes controversial. In 2016, The DAO (an early version of today's DAO) was tapped for $60 million worth of ETH, and investors in The DAO probably didn't intend that to happen. Most Ethereum validators implemented a hard fork to reverse exploit transactions, but some validators rejected the move, creating Ethereum Classic in the process.
Aave DAO vote to save lost tokens is not so controversial. The proposal passed with more than 99.9% of the votes. Only one user voted against the proposal with a single AAVE token.
