Ethereum User Loses Over $500,000 Forever after Sending ETH to Wrapped Ether (WETH) Contract

One of the cons of transactions in the crypto industry is sending coins of any form to the wrong address. Many exchanges such as Binance usually leave a warning note for users. They usually say if you send tokens to the wrong address, you might lose them forever.

An Ethereum user has made a similar mistake and he’s currently paying dearly for it. A Reddit user has raised the eyebrows of many crypto community members after revealing how he lost over $500,000 worth of ETH to the wrong address.

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The users took to Ethereum subreddit to share his ordeal. According to the user identified as basubadelmevt on Reddit, he mistakenly sent a huge sum of ETH to Wrapped Ether (WETH) contract.

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The post title says, “Did I just lose half a million dollars by sending WETH to WETH’s contract address?”

Basubadelmevt wrote:

“Edit 1: Sent ETH to WETH contract and got WETH back (after some googling I found this is how the contract works). Assumed it works the same way backward and sent WETH back to the contract. No ETH back. Apparently, you have to use a frontend to get the ETH back. ETH lost forever.

“Edit 2: Thanks, strangers. I am really happy to see lots of kind-hearted people in the comments and chat. This is a significant amount of money for anyone to lose and it was the case for me as well. I was under the stress of some other things in my life and made a bigger mistake by making assumptions in this wild early technology. But, I will be OK.

“Edit 3: I am also sorry that this was a negative event for the perception of cryptocurrencies. The last thing I would want in this world 🙁 A life-changing lesson for me, but definitely something to work on as a community as well.”

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As expected, the crypto community heavily reacted to the user’s ordeal. A crypto enthusiast who reacted pointed out that such a huge amount of money should not be lost by mistake. He said there has to be a solution around it before crypto can become mainstream:

“Losing a half million dollars worth of crypto by mistake is something that needs to be addressed before crypto can become mainstream. When it’s this easy to lose everything, there’s no way your grandma is going to be using it.”

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