Unclaimed 2017-sale DOT moved to Asset Hub, where the claims page is broken
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readHolders of Ethereum addresses from the 2017 Polkadot token sale who never claimed their DOT now have to claim on Polkadot Asset Hub, not on the relay chain, and the usual tool for doing it is broken. A step-by-step guide posted on the Polkadot Forum on 27 September says the Claim Tokens page in polkadot.js apps does not work on Asset Hub since the claims were migrated there, because it leaves the required statement out of the message the user signs. An issue has been filed and a fix proposed, according to the post.
Until the fix lands, the guide describes a manual route through the Developer menus of polkadot.js apps connected to Asset Hub. The user first looks up the Ethereum address in chain state to see the unclaimed amount, in planck, and whether the claim needs the Regular or the SAFT statement; the post says that as of 11 September every unclaimed address shows one of the two. The user then converts the destination Polkadot address to its 64-character hex public key, builds a single-line message from a fixed prefix, that hex and the statement text, signs it with the Ethereum wallet that held the sale tokens, and submits the claim as an extrinsic.
The claim is a free, unsigned transaction, so no DOT is needed to make it, and the destination account does not have to exist on chain yet. The guide repeats one warning: the DOT goes to whatever account the hex in the signed message points to. If that hex is wrong, the tokens land in an account nobody controls and cannot be recovered.
What it means
A migration that moves balances correctly can still break the path users take to reach them. The manual method works, but it puts a single unrecoverable mistake, a mistyped key, in the hands of holders who have waited nine years. Anyone offering to claim on someone else's behalf in the meantime deserves suspicion: the process needs no payment and no third party.