A year-long program by EOS Founding Block producer, EOS Authority came to a successful climax earlier this month and led to the recovery of some 2,662,479 EOS tokens worth around $7.6 million at the time of writing this report.
The holders of these tokens reportedly owned EOS when the coin was still hosted on Ethereum’s ERC-20 protocol, but failed to reclaim their tokens since EOS launched mainnet in 2018.
To aid the recovery of these locked tokens, EOS Authority rolled out a smart-contract-based program that gave these token holders a lifeline to recover their digital assets.
In other words, they could reclaim the tokens by cryptographically proving ownership of Ethereum key on-chain, which automatically resets their EOS genesis keys thereby granting them access to EOS tokens on the new chain.
According to live stats, some 1983 EOS accounts were recovered during the program which is now closed, pending renewed interest by accounts still holding ERC-20 EOS tokens.
Do Lost Coins Still Count as Circulating Supply?
The latest recovery report is significant since it means the circulating supply of EOS tokens will more closely match the value of tokens adding liquidity to the market.
In a recent similar situation, Coinfomania reported that at least $3 billion worth of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BitcoinSV) has not been claimed by holders since the network forks, although these coins are still added to their quoted circulating supply.
Additionally, a recent study confirmed that at least 6.2M ETH out of the 110M ETH in circulation is confirmed burned/lost, with another 3.8M ETH also likely lost or burned.
Even a significant portion of Bitcoin’s reported 18.35 M BTC in circulation is also known to be permanently lost.
