[PROPOSAL #29][ACCEPTED] Updated genesis atoms recovery request proposal

Thank you again @kjn311, for your thoughtful response .
I completely agree with you that losing a donor seed phrase is not a bug.

I also understand that this might look familiar with the polkadot situation.However , with Cosmos , there is a chance to be significantly different when comparing ourselves to ethereum. The beautiful thing about the Cosmos governance structure is that it enables and empowers the Validators to assess a proposal and take their decision. And that is why it is no surprise that we are already a big leap forward when compared to any other blockchain out there.

That is also why I am probably more hopeful than the Parity would have been when it comes to the Polkadot recovering its eth.

I would go one step further to suggest that if a polkadot type situation occurs in the Cosmos ecosystem , then at the least there is a shot to solve the issue with the help of a proposal and Validators voting for it.

Generally a big fan of the spirit of the proposal and excited to see it finally going through.

One piece of technical detail, is that part of the process needs to be to guarantee that the genesis account claimed as lost has not made any transactions in the history of the Cosmos Hub (proving that there is in fact a key holder of the account).

The donation amount will increase by 10% for each subsequent genesis atoms recovery proposal upto 50%, after which all future genesis recovery proposals will be required to donate 50% of the recovered atoms

I don’t quite understand what this means? I think this genesis recovery process should be a one time thing.

Is there a way to guarantee that everyone who may have lost genesis Atoms has had an opportunity to submit a claim in this proposal? As well as guarantee anyone who may want to submit a claim cannot be censored?

Perhaps we can split this into two governance proposals. The first with proposal of doing the fund recovery process. Anyone who wants to make a claim, can submit a claim in the memo field of a vote tx. Then a second governance proposal can be made confirming the exact transfers generated from the claims from memos.

Thoughts?

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I think it would be undesirable to open this particular recovery process up to more participants.

This group has been actively engaged with governance for more than a year in hopes of regaining the ability to participate in the network.

We made substantial efforts to contact anyone else that we were aware of.

The window of opportunity to do this in the stargate migration is closing quickly.

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Why?

What were the efforts made? I just want to make sure there was a fair opportunity for everyone who may have been affected by lost fundraiser keys to participate in the recovery, which as I mentioned, I believe should be a one-time operation, and thus should make best efforts to be as inclusive as possible.

Hi! Great question. From what I can see, there are two major risks. One is that a false claim could be made.

I may be incorrect about this. If a claimant can prove that they control the key that made the original fundraiser contribution, there’s a small possibility that the contribution key was compromised and the rightful owner could be different from the claimant.

For example, say I contributed 100 ETH in the fundraiser and have not moved my ATOMs yet. My Ethereum private key is discovered by someone else, but that’s okay because I don’t use it anymore. Now someone could use my old Ethereum key to make a claim on my ATOMs without my knowing it. This risk seems small to me.

I think the other major risk here is that of trust in the reliability of the Cosmos Hub. Most crypto users expect that funds only move under human control if the transaction is authorized with a signature created via private key. The process of ganting ownership to the claimants would be manual (ie arbitrary) and would violate those expectations.

In this case, I’m guessing that the solution would be to change the state of the ledger manually so that certain Cosmos Hub addresses from the fundraiser will be reduced from (millions of $ worth of ATOM?) to zero, and new addresses under the control of claimants will be changed to have the respective balances from the zeroed fundraiser accounts.

These changes would be considered by most to be arbitrary, since essentially the decision would be made by the validator set (but also influenced by the delegators), rather than the protocol itself.

Some may see this as a feature where the stakeholders can make right something that went wrong. Others may see this as breaking a fundamental assumption that only your private keys control your crypto assets.

HI @Gavin ,

I agree the risk of the false claim is small because anyone who wanted to move their atoms in lieu of the fear of a false claim being made would have already moved their atoms from their genesis wallets.

To address your second point .
This was an issue w.r.t to the fundraising genesis wallets only and as I mentioned in the response to another community member in this post.

This proposal if passed will not be a precedent to arbitrarily move atoms between addresses.

I think we have been in communication in the past w.r.t to this very topic , but I dropped the ball for a bit before I fell sick with health issues followed by personal issues. Please do reach out to me if there is anything else I could help with to alleviate any more concerns.

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Hi Vee! Glad to see that you’re championing this again.

I should clarify that my comment is in reply to this question here, which I think went unaddressed: Updated genesis atoms recovery request proposal

Ah , Understood . Thank you for Clarifying :slight_smile:

Hi Gavin,

many thanks for addressing my question. Very good points. So the main question is whether stakeholders view arbitrary access to wallet as a feature that is useful or as a limitation of the network. Probably community will be split towards it. Validators likely to act based on their personal interests to avoid risks as there is likely little to gain from this vote personally.

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Hi @btcgene . Thank you for your response .
I would redirect you to my response to Gavin’s concerns.

To put it as succinctly as possible .
This proposal does not set a precedent for recovering lost/stolen atoms of addresses activated past genesis

“w.r.t to your opinion that Validators have little to gain” , I would like to say that I do not believe that Validators are in the ecosystem only for the gains . They are in this because they believe in the governance structure and know that they can shape the direction of this ecosystem. This opinion may be perceived as having no interest in allowing early contributors to participate in the ecosystem but rather interested in keeping circulating atoms low. Which is counter intuitive given that the atoms by design are meant to inflate (minimally) at 7% every year.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I understand your points. I did not see validators in that perspective. I think in theory you are right, but in real world people are driven by incentives. And I have a worry that validators and large part of community might see this recovery in very different light than you expect. So the issue might be not what happens and for what reason, but lack of communication what problem is being solved and what perspectives people have. Since many people do not devote much time to get into details, they will just generalize with a view that is more beneficial to them, which is likely not in favor for early ICO investors who lost atoms.

I think its pretty clear what problem is being solved if people bother to read the proposal, and I don’t see this as a reason not to go forward with it. I am an ico investor and support this proposal 100%. I don’t see it as breaking the scarcity of the immutable ledger either. We have governance for a reason. Also I don’t think stopping this proposal based on claims that someone’s private key can be stolen is much of a point. That is a risk for everything, and technically if were getting into immutability whoever owns the private key does own the funds, so don’t lose your keys.

This is a great initiative.

I feel this should be a one time effort, rather than keeping a window open for future proposals of the same kind. In that case, for the sake of fairness to all ICO participants, this proposal should be well advertised before it is submitted for voting to ensure anybody who might have missed this is not left out of this one time opportunity.

This could have the adverse effect of allowing people who have illegitimately gotten their hands on ICO participating BTC and ETH accounts to get their hands on some free ATOM, but this risk is very small. It can also be partly mitigated through a check that Sunny has discussed above, i.e. have any transactions been effected from the original genesis account related to the ICO participation.

Thank you for supporting our cause! I helped @vee_em set up and maintain this proposal since March 2019.

One of the efforts I made early on was trying to find other people who might have lost their genesis Atoms. I searched this forum, the Cosmos Discord, Telegram, Reddit and Twitter and DM’d people who asked others for help concerning lost genesis Atoms. I also tweeted about the recovery effort.

Several of the contacts that I established in this way fizzled out, e.g. because people had donated from an exchange address and were unable to get their exchange to sign a message. Or because they no longer had access to their donation address.

Still, some of the people who are now “in” are there thanks to this outreach. Most notably Iconomi, where I originally established a link concerning this cause via contacts I already had at the company.

All in all, between my outreach effort, and the fact that our proposal was documented here on the forum for over a year, we can say that anybody interested in recovering their genesis Atoms had a fair chance to notice this opportunity.

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Hi Sunny :slight_smile: . Thanks for your support.
You were the one who helped me start working on the proposal when I did not know exactly where to start . Thank you for that initial push in the right direction ! .

To answer your questions.

  1. The thought process behind increasing the donation amount for every window was to ensure that people who do want to request their atoms through this proposal will understand that it is in their best interest to get in the first window as opposed to the future ones.

  2. As @cryptic_monk mentioned we made extensive efforts on all possible forums to reach out to people who may have been affected by this. Apart from the 7 transactions with signed messages above there were 2 others who reached out to us . However two of them have not followed up with us for about a month . I have tried to send multiple reminders , unfortunately received no response from them. We believe given that this forum has had the proposal since April of last year , the ones who would have wanted to reach out to us already have.

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I think sufficient efforts have been made to reach people.

@vee_em thanks for pushing this forward. Can you please clarify this statement -

I’m not understanding the concept of subsequent proposals. Isn’t this a one-time thing?

The way I read it is that about 1318592.76 ATOMS will be recovered through this proposal, which is about 0.5% of the total supply.

Is the idea that this might be the first of multiple recovery proposals?

Hi @chris-chainflow ,
Thank you for taking the time to assess the proposal .

To answer your question .

We extensively over the last year reached out as many people as possible through reddit and twitter and also had a precursor to this proposal on the forum . We believe that all those who needed to reach out already did. The reason why we wrote the proposal this way is to ensure that the genesis atom holders realize the urgency and will not be dependent on future proposals on account of the increase in donation.The other reason is that even if we do have a window for genesis atom recovery as a one time thing there is still a miniscule chance of someone missing that window and they will be shut out forever . So increasing the donation amount by an additve factor of 10% would be a happy medium in such a situation.

Please feel free to reach out to me if there are additional questions and thank you again for considering this proposal.

I also generally agree on this proposal but I have one suggestion.

How about we have a long(maybe 2 years or longer) continuous vesting period for 90% of recovered atoms ? To have minimal effect on short term atom market price, and makes the holders stay longer around our ecosystem than sell and say goodbye?

Of course vested atoms can be staked to participate on governance.

I think this condition will bring more yes vote because the immediate selling after receiving recovered atom will be one of the biggest risk exposed to this proposal.

Note) continuous vesting is not implemented on standard sdk i remember, but it is implemented by terra or kava and it is very easy to integrate. If we dont do this, the vesting can be spread to multiple monthly vesting.

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So I’m not in a position to make a unilateral decision here but I’ll make a few points.

1.3 million ATOMs are tiny compared to the daily volume of ATOMs. These funds are also going to be unlocked at moment that IBC is launched. It seems unlikely to have a material impact on the price even if all the unlocked ATOMs immediately hit the market. We’ve seen larger unstaking events be absorbed by the market without large price effects.

Several of these holders have been actively involved in the community even without access to their ATOMs. It seems unlikely that they would fully liquidate their position.

Finally, psychologically I’d like to just close this issue instead of having it hanging around for years.

I would consider reaching for liquidity constraints as a tool here if the amount was 10x larger.

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