The Maine State Treasurer’s Office published a report that emphasized the interest of the State in formally overseeing abandoned and recovered cryptocurrency assets.
The program evaluation report of Maine revealed a need for more in the state’s readiness to manage cryptocurrencies. It stated:
“Our office does not currently handle cryptocurrency, but programs like Unclaimed Property may need to start addressing the situation of abandoned cryptocurrency accounts.”
“At this time, our office does not deal with cryptocurrencies; however, initiatives such as Unclaimed Property may be required to address dormant cryptocurrency accounts.”
Official statistics indicate that the state of Maine possesses unclaimed property worth more than $328 million at this time. Name, address, and property identification number are required of claimants looking for unclaimed property on the website.
Additionally, the report revealed that the state treasurer was considering the adoption of reforms on emerging concerns such as cryptocurrencies, automated clearing house payments, and technology. The statement read:
“While our current statutes and precedent elsewhere leave us without clear authority to hold our recovered crypto assets, we may want to do so in the future.”
The matter concerning unclaimed cryptocurrencies is a widely recognized phenomenon within the Ethereum ecosystem. There were 8,893 participants in an Ether presale event during the summer of 2014. Nevertheless, millions of dollars worth of ETH remains unclaimed in those presale wallets after nearly a decade.
Recent reports from Maine Wire indicate that Maine Democratic Party members refused to refund a $100,000 contribution from Sam Bankman-Fried.
After seven guilty verdicts in the FTX-SBF case, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York demanded that political committees repay the contributions they received from FTX.
A cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, introduced a tool in 2022 that could retrieve unsupported ERC-20 tokens that were “inadvertently sent” to its address.
Coinbase stated, “Our recovery tool can transfer unsupported assets directly from your incoming address to your self-custodial wallet without ever exposing private keys.”
“We accomplished this by routing the funds directly from your incoming address without passing them through our centralized exchange infrastructure using patent-pending technology.”
Unrecoverable cryptocurrencies sent to unsupported wallets add to the accumulating accumulation of unclaimed cryptocurrencies. Coinbase rectifies this by furnishing “the contract address of the lost asset and the Ethereum TXID for the transaction in which the asset was lost.” This information can subsequently be utilized to retrieve the misplaced funds.
