Starkware has agreed to reactivate access to its outdated wallets after temporarily blocking users from accessing $550,000 worth of funds.
“When 0.12.1 goes live, accounts that have not been upgraded will be temporarily inaccessible,” Starknet tweeted on Wednesday. As of today, the upgrade has been re-enabled, allowing users to regain access to their accounts immediately. For technical reasons, it may take until tomorrow for Argent and Braavos users to regain access.
According to Ana Vukina – customer support officer of Ethereum layer 2 wallet Argent – all accounts whose users did not upgrade to Starknet’s latest smart contract before August 21 are unusable .
“Over the past year, we have announced the need to upgrade your wallets, and any wallets that do not upgrade by this date will be forfeited,” Vukina told a stripped Starknet user on Discord on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, this is a network-specific change, not one that we control. According to Starkware, wallets that do not upgrade promptly will lose their assets.”
Starknet is a decentralized layer 2 network for scaling Ethereum transactions using ZK-rollups, bundling multiple transactions together before posting them to the main Ethereum blockchain as a single transaction.
Vukina explained that Starknet is a “rapidly developing new network” that has undergone many major upgrades and changes in preparation for its full launch. Both Starkware and Argent have been warning users about upgrading for months and urging them to save money on various social channels.
Despite the warnings, many were unhappy with Starknet’s initial approach.
“Networks that let you lose access to user funds due to a ‘network upgrade’ deserve a boycott,” Starknet user Belgio tweeted on Wednesday.
Others say there are alternatives available that will protect all user funds without slowing the pace of Starkware innovation.
One Twitter user argued: “They could have done an upgrade where assets were not lost but moved to the claim address and presented a merkle/proof tree for recovery.”
According to Starkscan, more than $78 million in assets are locked in Starknet accounts, of which $546,000 is in “outdated” accounts. About 15% of the network’s 2.1 million accounts are outdated.
