DeFi bug accidentally gives $90 million to users, founder begs them to return it

Published

4 years ago

October 1, 2021

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About $90.1 million has mistakenly gone out to users of popular DeFi staking protocol Compound after an upgrade gone epically wrong. Now, the founder is making a plea — and issuing a few threats — to incentivize the voluntary return of the platform’s crypto tokens.

“If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error: Please return it,” Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Labs, tweeted late Thursday.

“Keep 10% as a white-hat. Otherwise, it’s being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed,” continued the tweet.

The price of Compound’s native token, COMP, initially plunged nearly 13% in a day on news of the bug, but it’s since gained back ground.

Whether reward recipients choose to return many millions of dollars to the platform remains to be seen, though if history is any indication, it is certainly possible.

“Alchemix [another decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocol] had a similar incident a few months back where they gave out more rewards than intended,” blockchain security researcher Mudit Gupta told CNBC. “Almost everyone who got the extra rewards refunded the extra.”

What is different here is that the Alchemix exchange lost just $4.8 million.

But Gupta remains hopeful.

“This makes me optimistic that people will refund most of COMP tokens, as well, but you can never be sure,” he said.

What went wrong

DeFi protocols like Compound are designed to recreate traditional financial systems such as banks and exchanges using blockchains enriched with self-executing smart contracts.

On Wednesday, Compound rolled out what should have been a pretty standard upgrade. But soon after implementation, it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong.

“The new Comptroller contract contains a bug, causing some users to receive far too much COMP,” explained Leshner in a tweet.

“There are no admin controls or community tools to disable the COMP distribution; any changes to the protocol require a 7-day governance process to make their way into production,” he added, indicating that no fix could take effect for seven days.

Gupta, a core developer at decentralized crypto exchange SushiSwap, said in a tweet that the entire episode could be blamed on a “one-letter bug” in the code.

Compound made clear that no supplied or borrowed funds were at risk, but that did little to soften the blow.

Protocol users en masse began reporting massive windfalls. Soon after Leshner’s tweet about the bug, $29 million worth of COMP tokens were claimed in one transaction. Another claimed that they received 70 million COMP tokens into their account, or about $20.8 million at the time of their post.

The list of COMP token millionaires goes on.

For users accustomed to providing their crypto to borrowers at a set interest rate, which is typically a single-digit APY, the erroneous and sizable rewards were certainly a nice change in pace.

Leshner made clear, however, that there is a cap to the carnage. The Compound chief tweeted that the Comptroller contract address “contains a limited quantity of COMP.”

“The impact is bounded, at worst, 280,000 COMP tokens,” Leshner wrote. Gupta told CNBC that this entire pool of tokens — worth about $90.1 million, as of the time of publication — has already been handed out.

Threats lack teeth

Newly-minted COMP token millionaires now have a few options.

Bitcoin developer Ben Carman points out that it isn’t really possible for the platform to reclaim the money.

“They shouldn’t be able to recall the money without rolling back the chain,” explained Carman. “They’d have to purposefully 51% attack the chain to get rid of some blocks.”

So, it is up to a user’s discretion to decide next steps.

As a hypothetical, let’s take the account holder who was accidentally gifted $29 million in COMP tokens in error. This user could return the funds and hold onto the $2.9 million “white-hat” tip. But there is also nothing to keep them from holding their mistaken reward and risk being “doxxed.”

Doxxing someone means making public what is considered private information about an individual, which in the cryptosphere, is tantamount to committing a cardinal sin.

“Doxxing their customers is about the worst thing a crypto company can do from a PR perspective,” Mati Greenspan, portfolio manager and Quantum Economics founder, told CNBC.

And it seems unlikely Leshner would pursue that route. He was quick to walk back his Thursday evening tweet, saying that, it “was a bone-headed tweet/approach.”

And then there’s the threat related to the mistaken reward being reported to the IRS.

“Section 61 of the IRS code defines income very broadly. If you received a large sum from this error and decide to keep it, that would be considered income,” explained Shehan Chandrasekera, a CPA and head of tax strategy at crypto tax software company CoinTracker.io.

Users who were mistakenly awarded extra tokens could voluntarily return the funds. In that scenario, Chandrasekera says that “technically the recipient is supposed to pay income tax based on the market value of the coins at the time of receipt, but if he or she returns the funds, there’s no reason to report the income.”

But Chandrasekera also makes clear that no one has to return the funds. If their reward is reported to the IRS, they would simply be subject to income taxes on that amount.

So that $29 million COMP token winner stands to take the most home in a scenario where they just pay up to Uncle Sam, rather than pay it back to Compound.

But as Greenspan points out, how things play out with this bug is almost entirely beside the point. “The bigger issue is – can it happen again?” he said.

Compound is the world’s fifth-largest DeFi protocol with a total value locked of $9.65 billion, according to DeFi Llama, which provides ranking and metrics for DeFi protocols.

“The protocol can easily absorb a loss of $90 million and a lot of it will likely be returned, but the larger issue would be if people lose confidence in the system’s ability to function properly,” said Greenspan.

Technology

Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Published

2 days ago

July 11, 2025

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

WATCH: Google pushes “AI Mode” on homepage

Technology

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Published

2 days ago

July 11, 2025

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Published

2 days ago

July 11, 2025

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.