🫡
Over the past few weeks I found more than $500k that people forgot they had left on @Balancer.View quoted post on X
Ethena, Gauntlet and Gnosis were among them. Most of it was invisible on explorers or dashboards.
Here's where it was hiding, and how I tracked it down.
It all started with the DAO's own old positions, to make sure nothing was left behind. I documented everything publicly so the community could follow along:
forum.balancer.fi/t/closing-the-…
Then I wondered how many other users had funds sitting in the same places. Turns out, a lot.
Three places it was hiding:
• Balancer v3 buffers. They use internal accounting, so they don't show up on most dashboards. Ethena, Gauntlet and others still had funds there.
• Old v2 liquidity mining incentives. The liquidity was gone, but the rewards were still waiting. Gnosis had 128k LDO it never claimed.
• Old veBAL protocol fees. After veBAL was discontinued, lots of people forgot to claim their leftover USDC.
The hard part wasn't knowing where to look. It was the sheer number of addresses. Years of LPs, from retail EOAs to DAO multisigs, way more than I could check by hand.
So I spawned a bunch of Grok Bots to do the grunt work: going through every contract, checking addresses one by one, and flagging anything with a balance left.
Merkle claims were the trickiest part. To tell whether something was still claimable, you have to match old weekly distribution reports against what was already claimed onchain. Miss one week and the numbers stop adding up.
Then came the fun part: figuring out who's behind an address and how to reach them.
I reached out to everyone I could find. Most have started withdrawing. Gnosis, for instance, opened a proposal to clean up its legacy Safe after I flagged it:
forum.gnosis.io/t/gip-xxx-with…
If you've ever used Balancer, it's worth a look. I wrote up where to check and how to withdraw here:
forum.balancer.fi/t/a-heads-up-f…
Balancer has been a big part of my life for over 5 years. I learned more there than anywhere else.
So instead of a sad goodbye as it winds down, I wanted to close the chapter doing what I love: digging onchain, and giving something back to the community that gave me so much.
My DMs are open if you need a hand. 🫡
