Ed Moncada here with Blockfolio.
First off, I would like to sincerely thank @vee_em for the time and effort that he has put into this discussion / proposal.
Our story is a bit different from the others on this thread, as we did not lose our seed phrase. We simply never received one.
Back in April of 2017 on the morning of the offering, my investment partner Calvin opened up his Brave browser while on the phone with me (edit for clarification: he was participating in the offering through his Mac laptop while one the phone with me). He was going to handle the transaction for us (of which I had a minority share). We knew there was a high likelihood that the Cosmos sale would sell out quickly so he was up early and waiting for it to begin, watching the countdown clock make it’s way down until the offering started. When the countdown was complete and the sale finally started, he informed me that a Bitcoin address appeared on his screen and asked if he should go ahead and send the Bitcoin there. Calvin was never presented with a flow to obtain a seed phrase, or one to confirm it. It just went straight to showing him a BTC address (and yes we have the transaction IDs that show we sent it to the right place - see below). Having participated in a number of ICOs prior where you would just send Bitcoin to a wallet address, I assumed the Cosmos sale was similarly designed so I let him know that we should just go ahead and send our Bitcoin in. He then sent in a total of 22 BTC from two different addresses.
https://btc2.trezor.io/address/16LQ1kwAq7QWGUx6Lc3Zt41AZVaRazTKqo (12 BTC sent)
https://btc2.trezor.io/address/14CXPxT4DBJVJaVroKyyuJ1Nuc3xXb29f4 (10 BTC sent)
Given how fast ICOs for high quality projects would sell out, we felt a sense of urgency to send our Bitcoin to make sure we didn’t miss out, and again having had participated in a number of other ICOs this flow did not seem out of the ordinary for us. Unfortunately, we did not find out until 2 years later that we were supposed to have received a seed phrase. Fortunately, we still have control of the two Bitcoin addresses that we sent in and participated from.
In our case, there was no user error. We obviously don’t know how this could have happened, but we can only postulate there may have been a bug that was missed when using Brave browser (which at that time was not nearly as used as it is today).
I feel incredibly fortunate to have been directed to this forum / proposal and feel incredibly thankful for @vee_em 's efforts. We also sincerely appreciate the consideration from all of those who are spending their time discussing. Debate and Governance are meant for situations like this.
Lastly, even though in our case it wasn’t a lost seed phrase, should this proposal be approved we would happily donate 20% of our recovered funds to the community pool, which looks to be a considerable amount. Also, I think the proposal would need to change slightly to include us as a new category of participant.
-Ed Moncada