Vote yes to return lost land to the rightful owner and protect your land from the unexpected

Governance
1

Summary:

Decentraland Community,

Have you ever hit “forgot password” on a website before?

According to Chainalysis, 17-23% of Bitcoin, the equivalent of roughly 44 billion dollars, is currently sitting in locked wallets.

Luckily, Decentraland parcels have an “activity” timer built into them.

Without leveraging this timer, the possibility that land can become “lost” and abandoned, lowers the value of the land because the “marketability” of that land is lower than it would be if it couldn’t possibly be lost or abandoned. This is why in almost all countries, they have a “probate” system that makes abandoned or land owned without a will when someone dies possible to get back into the economy.

By voting YES on my proposal, the Decentraland Community will create a method by which those who have a situation of “lost” land can prove their case to the community. If the community or community judiciary approves the claimant’s case, the land would be returned to the claimant in a wallet for which they control the keys.

Abstract:

What I ask of the community are three things:

  1. Let’s set the precedent for this scenario of lost land for the future.
  2. Take the time to hear my case (see link(s) below)
  3. Vote YES to return my land and simultaneously create a precedent for these situations moving forward.

In my presentation below, I will prove to the community the following things:

  1. The land is verifiably mine based on evidence from individuals and the blockchain.
  2. That this is something we CAN fix moving forward.

Motivation:

I made a mistake. A devastating, embarrassing, crypto 101 type of mistake.

I lost my seed phrase and my Ledger Nano S reset on me. This resulted in a locked wallet with a significant number of parcels inside of it.

I have felt the pain, loss, embarrassment and shame associated with losing a seed phrase to a valuable crypto wallet.

I present to you my case for my lost land through a claim supported by evidence and testimony:
Video of my claim for lost land:

Presentation link for my lost land:

Specification:
I need help from an Ethereum coder at Decentraland or in the community who could upgrade the smart contract to add a clause that re-assigns land to another Ethereum address for which I control the keys. This clause would also allow for claims to be made on parcels with at least 1 year of inactivity.
I am flexible on the structure of the contract and can have it all voted upon by the community, but at least allows the ability for this particular set of parcels in my wallet to be reassigned.

For:
Vote YES to:

  • Upgrade the Decentraland smart contract to allow for claims on “lost” land.
  • Allow users who make “lost land” claims to put their case in front of the community for a vote on ownership based on evidence.
  • Transfer the land in my locked wallet back to me as the first successful lost land claim.

Against:
Vote NO:

  • To keep land in lost wallets abandoned without the possibility of legitimate claims to be made on such land forever.
2

Hi Ethen,

I appreciate the time and effort invested in making your case as clear as possible.
I’m glad to see your proposal passing the inbox period and moving forward to “Community Vote” at the DAO.

About me:
I’m a software engineer and early contributor to Decentraland. I am not currently under Decentraland’s payroll but I’m very interested in seeing this project succeed.

I would like to help with the specification and implementation of this update. I may not be able to code it all by myself but I can commit to kick-start it, delegate if necessary and follow it up until competition.

At a first glance, we need to update the LAND and ESTATE smart contracts to allow the DAO to change the owner of a property. We also need to update the governance’s UI to allow users to create a new type of proposal under the name “Lost Land Claim” so after a positive vote of the community the LAND will be automatically transferred.

I’ll be posting the progress on this thread.

Yemel Jardi

3

Thank you so much for reaching out to me, Yemel.

I really appreciate your help. I cannot imagine going through this alone.

can we set up a time to speak about the next steps?

4

I have land that I purchased during the initial auction. Long story short, my computer crashed and I lost everything. What can I do to get my land back.

5

Yemel,

Thank you for your diligent effort here in helping make the community a better place.

Is there any way that we can touch base on how I can properly format the new DAO Proposal to push your request to the contract and then, hopefully, put my situation to a vote again?

Thank you and have a great day.

6

Hi Ethen,

Sure! Let’s do a catch-up.

Does Thursday 10am EST work for you?

7

I can make that work for 30 minutes or can do Friday at 10-11 if you believe we need a little more time.

Thanks so much

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30 minutes should be ok. See you soon :slight_smile:

El El mar, 2 feb. 2021 a la(s) 21:42, Ethen Ostroff via Decentraland <decentraland@discoursemail.com> escribió:

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Great. Sent you a discord message to coordinate the meeting link. I can send a zoom or google meet.

10

Yo!

I did a proposal recently…

Let me know if the suggest way would of worked for you…
(Do you trust the previous eth addresses that you interacted with to sign a tx to reclaim the land?)

How it would work in your case would be.
Hi my name is Ethen… etc, etc… e
I lost my land at xx,xx and would like to reclaim it to adress 0xEthansNewAddress…
I have contacted 0xBinanceOrSomeone… and they said they can verify the transaction to my new address 0xethan…

Would that of worked for you?

11

Surely this would mean that if someone sold me the mana to buy the land they could try to claim the land back using this method of having a previous interacted address able to sign for it and this it will be abused. safest way would be an inactivity timer that returns land to the DAO

12

Hi BET and San,

Thanks for your comments. Let me share with you the summary of our call with Ethen.

Glossary:
Owner: Sole address marked as the owner of a parcel or state.
Operator: Set of addresses with Owner privileges over one or all assets of an address (they can transfer land).

Proposed modification:
Include a method in the smart contracts handling parcels and states to allow the owner of the contract (currently the DAO) to grant/remove operator privileges over all assets of an address to another address.

  /**
   * @dev Sets or unsets the approval of a given operator
   * An operator is allowed to transfer all tokens of the sender on their behalf
   * @param _from inactive address to set the approval
   * @param _to operator address to set the approval
   * @param _approved representing the status of the approval to be set
   */
  function setApprovalForAllByContractOwner(address _from, address _to, bool _approved) external onlyOwner {
    require(_to != _from);
    operatorApprovals[_from][_to] = _approved;
    emit ApprovalForAll(_from, _to, _approved);
  }

See the code changes on github.

Overview
This method can only be called by the DAO. If another user calls this method the operation will fail.

In order to call this function, a user needs to submit a transaction proposal to the DAO. The lifecycle of a proposal process is explained in detail here and more details about the Security Advisory Board (SAB) can be found here.

The proposal once submitted will move through 3 stages: Inbox, Security Delay, and Community Voting. The proposal can be revoked by the community or the SAB at any stage. Moreover, if nobody votes the proposal will be revoked automatically.

That’s why every proposal should be in the companion of a forum post providing evidence to the community so they can signal their consent. Note that we are delegating to our community what is the criteria to approve or reject the proposal. We should define what is enough evidence to prove a case. No time or past-interactions restrictions have been included in the smart contract.

As a community, we should agree on the minimum evidence needed to approve a request. It would be great to have some community champions that volunteer to verify the evidence.

For example, we could agree on the following as minimum evidence:

  • The address is inactive for X months (we check it on Etherscan).
  • A signed message from an address that had contact with the inactive.

Human verification vs Smart Contract
This process requires the community to vote every time someone needs to reclaim access to their land. Just like we have to vote to include a point of interest to the map or ban a name.

We could eventually add a shorter path that auto-validates the evidence and does not require voting, however it requires more engineering effort and knowledge about the problem.

What are the next steps?
We need to add tests to the pull request and get an external code review to ensure the code is ok. Then it will be merged into Decentraland’s main repository and new contracts will be deployed to the Ethereum network by the Decentraland Foundation. A new vote will start to upgrade the contracts to the new version.

What happens if the vote passes?
Once the upgrade is approved, Ethen will be able to submit his proposal to assign operator privileges to an address he owns. If the proposal passes, he will recover his land.

Ethen will be able to transfer the land to a new address or just keep it as it is. Note: It may be expensive to transfer a lot of land plots and states.

Thoughs? Questions?

14

@yemel Would love to keep progress moving here.

Please let me know what I can do to help keep this moving along.

Thank you

1 Like
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Hi @yemel , i have just had my metamask breached and everything taken, im have just been vomiting for past 30 mins trying to understand what is and has just happened. im still trying to work it out but im not amazing at reading eth scan. i only had smaller amounts of cypto tokens in there, $500 ETH $500 Mana $1000 Rfox and some smaller ones, but im not really worried about that crytpo compared to my 2 parcels on Land in DCL, i fell destroyed and lost now i dont knwo what to do, where to turn to, i have purchased 2 block and along with that i have purchases about 50000 Mana of metazone stuff that i had for my lands, i had big plans for DCL i was heavily involved with Ethermon and thats what most of my metas where, this was going to be my business my future income my retirement plans and was something i woke up to each day excited that i was part of one to the best opportunities in a life time DCL. all i want is just to get my land back so i can rebuild what i had started and hoped for the future, is there any way or some how i can be lucky enough to have that opportunity, my 2 lands where 91,38 and 113,44 please help me. Thank you for reading this

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20210502_021952
20210502_0219524000×1800 1.38 MB

the 2 highlighted ones are the 2 lands missing

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20210502_024112
20210502_0241124000×1800 930 KB
20210502_024131
20210502_0241314000×1800 1.03 MB
20210502_024209
20210502_0242094000×1800 1.54 MB
20210502_024335
20210502_0243354000×1800 947 KB
20210502_024340
20210502_0243404000×1800 1.45 MB

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I have the same problem, my old laptop HDD died and dont have phrase for meta mask…but i have all evidence of purchase of LAND and forum/discord posts etc dated at the time of purchase…i really need to recover my LAND! Thankyou

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@jwcobley @itsalllk
Would this proposal work for you?

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Hi, I have metazone stuff on there and operate and occupy the land myself. But what my metamask got hacked I listed everything in to $5000 mix of crypto, and my 2 land in dcl where also there and where taken. All I was hoping for and trying to fight for was the land back. Yes crypto is good but can be replaced easier than the 2 land I had. I have amazing spot I brought for the ethermon metas i have, I was ready for ethermon to take off.

21

@BET is there a 90 day period after a transfer to fight and make a claim or dispute transfer of land? Should I post in the one you sent me?