Lost Tokens: Requirements

Owned by Mike Tango Bravo
Last updated: Feb 03, 2022
2 min read

What happens when a customer loses the keys to their wallets with MTB* tokens? 

This is going to be a common occurrence. People lose their phones, and forget where they wrote down their 12-word seed phrases. For most cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, losing access to your wallet would be definitive: there is no way we can recover access to those tokens. But since MTB* tokens correspond to actual physical bottles of wine, and the tokens are burned when they are spent, we could imagine creating a smart-contract for those people who lost their tokens.

Remember that we guarantee holding the bottles of wine for up to 10 years. After that, the tokens are automatically burned, and any remaining bottles return to the winery. So if you truly lost access to your tokens, but you still know the token address, we could create a smart contract like this:

  1. The owner of the lost wallet creates a new (empty) wallet. 

  2. This person sends some small amount of ether from this new wallet, to the lostMTB_smart-contract, and specifies the original (lost) wallet address, the token (i.e. MTB19), and the amount of tokens he or she wishes to recover. 

  3. After 10 years, from the date of the token loss, IF THE LOST WALLET HAS NOT SHOWN ANY OUTWARD MOVEMENT, an equivalent amount of replacement MTB tokens, and the original ether (minus gas) are sent to the new wallet ID. 

  4. If, at any time during the 10 years after the loss of the original wallet, any outbound activity is registered on the wallet ID, indicating that someone has recovered the keys, the ether reserve is sacrificed, and sent to the costaflores wallet, and the smart-contract is finished. 

This smart-contract could be used by people who lose their wallet ID's, but could also be used by third-parties who suspect that dormant wallets have been abandoned. An interesting gamble. This creates and incentive for "losers" to first reserve their lost tokens, as it would be first-come-first-serve for the smart contract.