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

• Moderator edit to add link to on-chain proposal: Mintscan Please note that the previous draft is posted here : Draft : Proposal to help fundraiser participants who lost their seed phrase This thread is an updated version. We request the community to please continue giving feedback here . DRAFT : :Proposal : A humble request to the Community & Validators of the Cosmos Hub to help the fundraiser participants (i) who did not receive their seed phrase (95% of requested recovery) (ii) lost seed before genesis block was created(5% of requested recovery) *Please note that this proposal shall not be implemented until the next breaking change is required . *i.e : There will be no breaking change for the sole purpose of helping the recovery of funds. *This proposal has a request from some fundraiser donation transactions requesting a recovery of the genesis atoms. *This proposal is only for the genesis block accounts from the very first hub. *This proposal does not set a precedent for future lost atoms(past genesis) or hacks. *This proposal accounts for a 10% donation to the community governance fund. *The donation amount will increase by 10% for each subsequent…

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I’ve been closely collaborating with this group.

Iqlusion intends to submit this proposal and implement the migrate command changes if this passes.

I really would like to see this business taken care of so Cosmos can move on to the next phase.

I was thinking what are the risks involved to such proposal getting passed?

For example how much cosmos network risks in exchange of being ‘nice’ or ‘the right thing to do’?

As a long-term fan of the Cosmos project, I am heartbroken that “my” Atoms remain stuck in their genesis address. I’d like to thank @vee_em for setting up this recovery effort and @zaki_iqlusion for his continued support of our cause. Like for all the other participants in this effort, there is cryptographic proof for my ICO donation and its link to the Atoms that I can no longer access. I hope that the validators consider the uniqueness of this situation and the fact that there is little purpose in letting these early supporter coins remain stuck forever.

Sincerely thank @vee_em for this recovery effort.After I knew I could not claim my Atoms,I felt so depressed and nearly gave up,then one community member told me this Proposal.I’m so grateful and I see the difference between Cosmos and other projects that Cosmos cares its funderaisers and cares every single part of its ecosystem,this is my last hope and I’m really proud of Cosmos.Hope that all validators could support this Proposal,help Cosmos ecosystem,help us,thank you all.Together,we are on the COSMOS way of being great!

At SG-1 we have discussed this internally and have had different viewpoints that we had to align to make a decision for this Proposal.

We have decided that our vote will go in favor of recovering the seed fundraisers.

We believe that the participants are most likely Cosmos supporter, with having participated in the fundraiser so early in the project. Releasing the funds is only fair, it will furthermore reactivate Cosmos participants that have cared for the project for many years. We expect clever investors and entrepreneurs to get back access to what belongs to them.

We believe this decision will empower the Ecosystem of Cosmos.

In order to be able to proof this, as the funds are being released via public votes, we hope that a list of cryptographic proofs on each address can be made public. This way we could have an in-depth analysis of the details which funds are being released and to which transaction this results. This would help us being more confident with our vote.

Regards,
your SG-1 team

This is a “benevolent power-demonstration“ which comes at a Credibility cost.

If at all, the atom should be returned to the ICF, and BTC/ETH funds to the original owners.

Well if I ever lose my ledger nano seed phase I should expect a written proposal from a trusted community member as well. Will ensure there are many of us beforehand. Thanks.

Hi kj311, Thank you for the feedback. The most important thing to note is that this proposal only accounts for the fundraiser genesis address. This proposal if passed does not account for lost/stolen private keys of addresses active after the genesis accounts and will not set a precedent for them. Those kinds of cases will require a different proposal and the ethics and discussions around them will be completely different from this proposal The phrases were lost even before the genesis block was created. I even contacted Ethan Buchman , the then president of interchain , however they were not willing to help. The only suggestion I got was to request a Validator vote driven proposal which I have been working on for the last year . A lot of time has been spent communicating to validators and requesting their help. So I implore you to please look at this with a kinder viewpoint. There are at least two cases where the donators did not receive their phrases during the fundraiser process after the Btc / eth were sent . They are also included in this proposal and are still willing to donate 10% to the community governance fund. This in no way will affect the credibility of…

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I feel for you I really do. Very unfortunate situation here. If it was me I would try everything in my power as well and would be praying for empathy. However, I just cant bring myself to support the proposal as written. Losing your seed phrase is not a bug. Fortunately for you, I’m just one guy so maybe the majority feel different. This really sucks.

Question1 : Who does this affect ?
Answer1 : It applies to

1. Participants who contributed to the fundraiser using a Bitcoin transaction(s) , and
2. have lost their 12 word seed, and
3. have the ability to sign messages with the Bitcoin address(es) that were used to
   contribute to the fundraiser.

This is reminiscent of when parity.io lost there Polkadot ICO funds. They did not get those funds back even though they tried.

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…

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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.

zaki_iqlusion:

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

Why?

zaki_iqlusion:

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

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…

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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. [PROPOSAL #29][ACCEPTED] Updated genesis atoms recovery request proposal Signaling/Text 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 su… 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…

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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

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.

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 [PROPOSAL #29][ACCEPTED] Updated genesis atoms recovery request proposal Signaling/Text 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… “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…

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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.

btcgene:

lack of communication what problem is being solved and what perspectives people have

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.

sunnya97:

What were the efforts made?

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.

Hi Sunny . 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.

I think sufficient efforts have been made to reach people.

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

vee_em:

*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’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 .

chris-chainflow:

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

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.

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.

First of all, I want to say that it’s great to see Cosmos Hub’s ability to get together and help out investors that helped us get where we are. Considering all the cryptographic evidence, I think the social engineering risks are negligible. Nevertheless, we should be very uneasy and careful when editing state. I have some issues with the proposal: • Why should future proposals which are in the exact same position as these investors need to pay more into the community pool? I don’t think that’s fair at all. If we’re going to agree that 10% is a fair tax for getting their funds recovered, and that they deserve their ATOMs back, then all future investors that come forward with the same evidence should be given the same privilege. • ATOM ICO investors are at 400-500% ROI compared to holding ETH and BTC at this point. Taking this into account, I think more than 10% of the ATOM should be deposited into the community pool. It seems reasonable to me to have an amount equivalent to the original ETH and BTC investment be put into the community pool, which is around 20% of the ATOMs at their current market value. • I agree with @bharvest in that these tokens should be vested,…

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I wanted to share my perspective as a relative newcomer to Cosmos. This seems like an important opportunity rather than a bad precedent. Agoric is building a public chain on Tendermint and IBC that will start life as a new zone. One of the questions we asked early is “how is the Hub different from our zone?”; a key answer was “governance”. The Cosmos community that deployed and governs the Hub has built world-leading expertise in launching, validating, and upgrading PoS systems with a deep asset pool. Soon, this team will grow expertise with how, whether, and when to connect with other chains (via IBC). When someone rolls out a new zone, their governance will be different, hopefully well-suited to their role in the interchain ecosystem. The consideration and ability to judiciously make changes is one of the key elements of governance, and this kind of proposal is a crucial early example of a governance challenge that shows how Cosmos differs from other systems. It is not a precedent that “governance will fix your mistakes”. It’s a precedent that governance can make a positive difference. From outside, this looks to me like a good thing to do for the chain and community. But…

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Draft : Proposal to help fundraiser participants who lost their seed phrase Proposal Ideas 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 M… above is a link to my story… First off, I’d like to say thank you all for considering this proposal and I appreciate the time you have taken out of your day. As you can read from the link above, my story is a bit different than Vee’s. Vee has been very helpful to myself and many others the last couple years working on this proposal. He has a lot of heart, and seems to be a genuine guy. I have a few different/additional points I’d also like to bring up. • The majority of funds being recovered (around 90%) are to people who didn’t do anything “wrong”. They sent their money and…

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I like this proposal a lot in theory, though I haven’t verified the signatures myself, and I see a problem with it. A big issue with this proposal is that it assumes that the address that sent the fundraiser tokens are the intended owners of these atoms. This is not always the case, and because of this, this proposal can be the source of theft of ATOMs. For example, for any user who sent Bitcoins from an exchange (custodian of donation source Bitcoins or Ether) would be vulnerable to getting their ATOMs stolen by the exchange operators. Nothing in the terms of the fundraiser prevents this scenario from happening, so we should assume that for some portion of account holders, those who can sign from donation Bitcoin/Ethereum addresses are NOT the rightful owners of the ATOMs. Given this, you can’t determine the rightful owner just by looking at the Bitcoin/Ethereum/CosmosHub chains. The Cosmos Hub wants (and is designed to accommodate) a significant portion of atoms (around 1/3) to be unbonded, and so they are. They pay the inflation tax, but the whitepaper defined the bounds on inflation (to be 20% a year). And, many ATOM holders don’t want to participate in delegation, and…

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@jaekwon Thank you for finally acknowledging this even though the precursor for this proposal on the forum for more than a year. And thank you for finally responding only because this is now an official Proposal that is on Chain . Untill now we were pretty much ignored. Before Answering your questions I want to assert three very important points. • The fundraiser software w.r.t to browser clients was released into the wild without adequate QA as acknowledged by @zaki who was instrumental in helping us put it on chain and and fronted the entire deposit. • This caused at least two participants to not even receive their seed phrase . • The other point is that this would have never been an issue if the participants were immediately given ownership through some proxy on a another chain like an erc_20 … (even if it were locked) . Unfortunately this was not done and paved the way for cases like people losing seeds even before the Genesis Block was created. Even something as simple as a KYC would have made life easier. In the case of point (2) , People did not get what they paid for ,plain and simple. In the case of point(3) , People lost a key to home that was not even…

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Forbole has voted yes to this proposal. I have explained briefly why.

Certus One is voting YES, here’s our reasoning: https://medium.com/certus-one/yes-for-cosmos-hub-proposal-29-4c4de6d71407

While Figment has voted yes, we should have independently verified the transactions and signatures of the claimants first. Thanks to Ethan Buckman for raising the issue. Here is a guide to independently verify the claims: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z63eSODNvpUw22L2oOPCirFCUhlh1VKyatTVBqmpfPc/edit?usp=sharing

even though the precursor for this proposal on the forum for more than a year Nobody is obligated to read through all the discussions going on. that’s the point of the proposal deposit (spam prevention) system – a proposal need only be read by staked ATOM holders once it’s reached the deposit limit. I don’t spend too much time reading forum posts unless I need to because I’m busy developing something for Cosmos. I have addressed the proposal since this threshold has been made, but also it’s up to the creator of the proposal (it seems to be Iqlusion in this case) to get feedback from those with more context on the thing being proposed. I wasn’t notified, and this is consistent with a pattern of exclusion of me from certain member(s) at Iqlusion. I don’t mind, but my defense stands. Clearly we need more time for proposals to get the discussion it needs, and I will address this in a new proposal. Several people push the guilt-tripping narrative with “but you didn’t pay attention to this when it was being worked on before” while simultaneously excluding me from conversations, sometimes quite intentionally, and we have discussed this internally to AIB and have relevant records…

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As a followup to the passage of proposal 29, I’ve begun implementation work here.

zaki_iqlusion:

As a followup to the passage of proposal 29, I’ve begun implementation work here.

Very nice! Any idea when this will get implemented on mainnet?

It will be part of the stargate update. it’s implemented as a part of state migration to stargate.