Over $1 billion of ether has been lost forever due to bugs and human error (2024)

Coinbase director Conor Grogan categorized thousands of mistakes and bugs on the Ethereum blockchain.
He found that 636,000 ETH ($1.15 billion) has beenlost forever — and that’s not including people that have lost access to their wallets.

Over $1 billion of ether has been lost forever due to bugs and human error (2)

More than $1 billion of ether has been lost forever due to bugs and human error,according to research by Conor Grogan, director of product strategy and business operations at Coinbase.

"I've categorized thousands of instances of Ethereum typos, user errors and buggy contracts," Grogan said on Twitter on Monday. He noted that he'd cataloged 636,000 ETH ($1.15 billion) that is lost, representing 0.5% of the coin's circulating supply.

The majority — some 514,000 ETH — is due to a 2017 bug in the Parity crypto wallet. Defunct crypto exchange Quadriga lost 60,000 ETH to a contract fault and the Akutars NFT collection lost 11,500 ETH in a failed Mint. On top of those, Ethereum users have cumulatively sent 24,000 ETH to a burn address, where the coins can no longer be accessed.

In most of these cases, the ether wasn't worth anywhere as near as much in dollars at the time of the loss.

Grogan added that his estimate, if anything, is an understatement. "This $1.1B+ number significantly undershoots the actual lost/inaccessible ETH amount — It just covers instances where Ethereum is locked forever," he said.

This is because access to many wallets will have been lost but there's no way of knowing which ones by looking at blockchain data alone.

Update: Fixed the amount lost in the Parity bug.

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Tim is the Editor-In-Chief of The Block. Prior to joining The Block, Tim was a news editor at Decrypt. He has earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of York and studied news journalism at Press Association Training. Follow him on X @Timccopeland.