Maine state treasurer to focus on handling abandoned cryptocurrency accounts
A report by the Maine state treasurer's office highlighted the US state's desire to publicly manage abandoned and recovered crypto assets.
Maine's program evaluation report exposes the state's lack of preparedness when it comes to handling cryptocurrencies. It reads:
“Our office does not currently handle cryptocurrency, but programs such as Unclaimed Assets should begin to address the situation of abandoned cryptocurrency accounts.”
According to official data, the state of Maine currently holds more than $328 million in unclaimed property. The website seeks the name, address and property identification information of claimants seeking unclaimed property.
The report highlighted the state treasurer's desire to implement reforms including technology, automatic clearing house payments and cryptocurrencies. He explained.
“While our current laws and other practices everywhere leave us with clear authority to hold our returned crypto assets, we intend to continue to do so in the future.”
The issue surrounding unclaimed cryptocurrencies is a well-known phenomenon throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. In the summer of 2014, 8,893 people participated in the Ether (ETH) presale event. However, ten years later, millions of dollars in ETH in those pre-sale wallets have not been claimed.
Related: Illinois Can Claim ‘Abandoned' Cryptocurrency Under New Bill
Maine Wire recently reported that members of the Maine Democratic Party refused to return a $100,000 donation they received from Sam Bankman-Fried. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has demanded that political committees return contributions they received from FTX after receiving seven guilty verdicts in the FTX-SBF case.
In the year In 2022, crypto exchange Coinbase launched a tool that can recover unsupported ERC-20 tokens that were “sent by mistake” to the exchange's address.
“Our recovery tool can move unsupported assets directly from your receiving address to your own wallet at any time without exposing your private keys,” Coinbase said. We have done this by using patented technology to send the money directly from your internal address without having to process the money through a centralized exchange infrastructure.
The inability to recover cryptocurrencies sent to unsupported wallets contributes to the ever-growing number of unclaimed cryptocurrencies. Coinbase changes this by providing the Ethereum TXID for “the transaction where the asset was lost and the contract address of the lost asset” that can be used to recover the lost funds.
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