Users "Forget" $27 Million on Polygon Bridge
Many users have inadvertently left a total of $27 million on the Polygon Bridge, likely due to missing the “claim” step when transferring funds back to Ethereum.
The funds in question are on the bridge between Ethereum and Polygon, which allows users to move assets between the two chains. When transferring money from Ethereum to Polygon, users only need to complete a single transaction step.
Conversely, to transfer funds back to Ethereum correctly, users must submit an additional transaction to claim assets from the Polygon-Ethereum contract, wait approximately one hour for Polygon to confirm that the tokens have been "burned," and then the tokens are sent to the user’s Ethereum address.
According to a blog post by ZenGo, over 35,000 transactions back to Ethereum via the bridge did not meet the standard. These funds amount to approximately $27 million, held in ETH and stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, and DAI.
ZenGo's co-founder and CTO, Tal Be’ery, commented:
“While it’s hard to imagine how someone could ‘forget’ millions of dollars, we believe this might be related to the additional transaction requirements and the fact that these funds cannot be claimed immediately, leading to accidental neglect of assets on the bridge.”
Polygon has since taken action by executing a claim transaction on behalf of a user who had “forgotten” $2 million on the bridge. This user had sent funds back to Ethereum in May but never completed the withdrawal process.
Polygon’s Chief Information Security Officer, Mudit Gupta, stated that not all funds are necessarily forgotten. Some may still be in the process of being withdrawn to Ethereum, while others might have been inadvertently sent to a wallet.
