Arkham Research has tagged and alerted wallet owners about funds stuck for months in various decentralized finance (DeFi) bridge contracts. Several crypto whale wallets, holding assets ranging from six to seven figures, are affected.
Among these, a wallet linked to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has over $1 million worth of assets stuck for more than seven months. Additionally, other wallets have assets remaining unclaimed for over two years.
According to a report by crypto analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, numerous whale addresses associated with prominent crypto individuals and entities have funds trapped in these bridge contracts for up to two years.
DeFi bridge contracts are protocols facilitating the transfer of assets and data between different blockchain networks, enhancing interoperability within the DeFi ecosystem.
However, not all DeFi bridges operate the same way. While some enable automatic asset retrieval on the other chain, users of native bridges must manually reclaim their funds. This can lead to situations where users forget about their funds.
Notable cases include a wallet linked to thomasg.eth, with $800,000 stuck in the Arbitrum Bridge for almost two years, and another associated with Bofur Capital, containing 27 wrapped Bitcoin worth $1.8 million, trapped for over two years.
Similarly, a wallet linked to NFT user Mike Macdonald holds approximately $117,000 in assets related to CryptoPunks sales on a bridge contract.
Arkham advised account owners to review their wallets, suggesting that if they own the sending account for certain transactions, they may also own the receiving account for the proceeds.
Another wallet that received 50 Ether from Vitalik.eth has been inactive for seven months, holding nearly $1 million worth of ETH on the Optimism bridge.
Furthermore, a wallet linked to Coinbase crypto exchange contains $75,000 worth of assets stuck for nearly six months, suspected to be an attempted bridge from USDC to ETH.
Arkham Research notified whale owners of these stuck funds, urging them to retrieve them if forgotten. They also reminded the community that such occurrences are typical with native bridges.