Imagine you wake up one morning to find $20 million in your bank account.
It might seem like a sweet deal for a while, but then you realize that the money isn’t legally yours. The bank will soon correct this mistake.
But...what if that bank couldn't?
This hypothetical scenario was made real by a handful of lucky users who used the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) staking protocol Compound. It acts as a bank but without the traditional banking rules.
Compound's founder now asks users to return $90 million or 280,000 COMP that was sent out in error. He's going to threaten users who refuse to return the money.
The DeFi protocol Compound, along with other DeFi protocols, works as a blockchain-based bank that allows users to borrow money or take out loans. In turn, the platform rewards lenders with its native COMP token.
The service published an upgrade Wednesday and things started to fall apart.
Robert Leshner, founder of Compound, tweeted that "The new Comptroller contract contains an error which causes some users to receive far more COMP."
The "far too many COMP" overpaid to Compound's users totals to approximately $90 million.
Remember the scenario where you could have $20 million in your bank account and then suddenly find yourself with another $20 million? This is what appears to have happened to at least one Compound user who tweeted a picture of more than 70,000,000 COMP in their account.
Another user may have received more than $29 million.
CNBC was told by a Bitcoin developer that Compound cannot get its money back due to blockchain's unique nature.
Leshner offered a deal to all users who had received the COMP tokens. You can return the money and keep 10 percent.
Leshner warns that Compound will tax the income if the users refuse to give up their wealth. He also warned users that they could be doxxed and their personal information would become public.
These threats are quite bizarre.
One thing is that regardless of whether Compound users keep all the COMP tokens, or the 10 percent, they still need to report their earnings and to pay taxes. It doesn't matter if Leshner intended to suggest this, but it seems as though he is saying that the IRS doesn’t need to know the 10 percent that a user keeps if the rest is returned.
CoinDesk says that the doxxing claim is a hollow threat. Compound does not gather any user information.
According to Leshner, this is a "moral dilemma" that will affect the users who have received the COMP tokens. Others in cryptocurrency disagree with Leshner, citing the popular phrase "code IS law", which implies that the protocol should be considered the rule. Mashable reached out to Leshner to get his opinion.
According to CoinDesk, two users had returned approximately $12 million worth of COMP tokens to Compound as of publication time. There are still approximately $78 million to collect.
