San Francisco, Oct 5 (IANS): About $90 million has mistakenly gone out to users of a popular decentralised-finance staking protocol Compound and the founder is begging users to voluntarily return the tokens.

These had mistakenly gone out to users after an upgrade gone epically wrong. Now, the founder is making a plea -- and issuing a few threats -- to incentivise the voluntary return of the platform's crypto tokens, reports CNBC.

"If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error: Please return it," Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Labs, tweeted last week.

"Keep 10 per cent as a white-hat. Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed," Leshner added.

The price of Compound's native token, comp, initially plunged nearly 13 per cent in a day on news of the bug, but it has since gained background, the report said.

Whether reward recipients choose to return many millions of dollars to the platform remains to be seen, though if history is any indication, it is certainly possible, it added.

DeFi protocols such as Compound are designed to recreate traditional financial systems such as banks and exchanges using blockchains enriched with self-executing smart contracts.

Last week, Compound rolled out what should have been a pretty standard upgrade. But soon after implementation, it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong.

"The new Comptroller contract contains a bug, causing some users to receive far too much COMP," explained Leshner in a tweet.

"There are no admin controls or community tools to disable the COMP distribution; any changes to the protocol require a 7-day governance process to make their way into production," he added, indicating that no fix could take effect for a week.