The Locked Ether Collective Call for a Structured Ethereum Recovery Framework for Users

• The Locked Ether Collective is proposing the launch of the Ethereum Fund Recovery Protocol (EFRP)
• Thousands of ETH investors have been impacted by locked or lost wallets due to gaps in early safety standards
• The EFRP is intended to be a structured and fair recovery framework that strengthens Ethereum’s governance and resilience for everyone.

In November 2017, the Parity Wallet Freeze saw 598 multi-signature Ethereum (ETH) wallets frozen. The exact number of individual people affected by this event is unknown, but the incident effectively froze an estimated 513,743 ETH, valued between $150 million and over $300 million at the time. The Locked Ether Collective (LEC) is now calling for a community-driven, non-contentious solution that could benefit all users who have permanently lost ETH due to technical bugs.

The Parity Wallet Freeze isn’t the only incident to affect Ethereum investors. Gaps in the cryptocurrency’s early safety standards, including smart contract vulnerabilities, misuse of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, and flawed upgrade or dependency mechanisms, mean that hundreds, if not thousands of people, have lost access to their funds over the years.

The Ethereum Fund Recovery Protocol (EFRP) proposed by the LEC aims to develop a structured and fair recovery framework that strengthens Ethereum’s governance and resilience for everyone. This is not a bailout, but rather a decentralised, transparent, rule-based system that allows legitimate owners to recover inaccessible ETH, without hard forks or altering Ethereum’s core protocol.

The EFRP would be built entirely on smart contracts and governed by a Technical Council DAO, designed to balance immutability, fairness, and accountability. Something that has been largely lacking in the cryptocurrency space, and needs addressing.

Led by a small group of individual Ethereum users and holders who were directly affected by the Parity wallet freeze, the LEC is not affiliated with Parity Technologies or any organisation connected to it. With the EFRP, they simply seek to provide a sustainable, community-approved framework for addressing lost funds and offer relief to users impacted by systemic technical flaws –not individual error.

On November 5th 2025, the LEC posted an EIP outlining the Ethereum Fund Recovery Protocol. Other members of the ETH community are invited to join the discussion.