HQ Assists Surgence in Recovering Funds Sent to Safe on the Wrong Network

Earlier this month, our friends at Surgence reached out to us with an urgent issue. They had executed a transfer to their ERC-20 Safe address, but on the BNB Chain.

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While most EOA crypto wallets like Metamask and Rabby allow you to use the same address across multiple networks, Safes are only deployed to one specific network.

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“This means if you created a Safe address on e.g. Ethereum mainnet, it does not mean that there is a Safe on the same address on e.g. Gnosis Chain.” - Tobias Schubotz, Co-Founder @ Safe

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The Solution

Upon understanding the problem, our HQ.xyz engineers first ensured that the Safe address on the destination chain, in this case BNB Chain, had not yet been deployed.

Fortunately, this was not the case, and HQ.xyz was able to help Surgence deploy a Safe with that address on BNB Chain.

We then encountered a new problem - their BNB Chain Safe was not able to detect any assets, despite on-chain data showing a positive balance.

While this could be due to a number of possibilities, it also meant that Surgence was not able to execute any transfers directly from their Safe.

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Recovering Funds with HQ.xyz

While payments could not be executed from Safe, we were able to guide Surgence to import their BNB Chain Safe into their HQ Dashboard.

Being compatible with both Safe and EOA wallets, the HQ Dashboard was able to detect their assets on BNB Chain.

From there, Surgence was able to queue a transaction from their HQ Dashboard using their imported BSC Safe address. Using the wallet associated with the Safe, they were then able to approve the transaction and successfully recover their funds.

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From there, Surgence was able to queue a transaction from their HQ Dashboard using their imported BSC Safe address. Using the wallet associated with the Safe, they were then able to approve the transaction and successfully recover their funds.

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How Fellow Operators can Avoid Similar Situations

As the old adage goes, “prevention is always better than cure”.

While we were grateful that we were able to help Surgence recover their funds, future incidents may not be as fortunate. For example, if their Safe address on BSC had already been deployed, there would have been little to no recourse in retrieving their funds.

So how can our fellow operators prevent such incidents from occurring?

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1. Make Payments with the HQ Dashboard

‍HQ Payments, powered by Safe, can detect when you are sending funds to an invalid destination address. For example, if you are sending to a Safe on the wrong network, your Dashboard will be able to detect the transaction and flag it out.

2. Add important contacts to your Address Book

As operators ourselves, we know the pain involved in verifying and entering the right address every time. With your HQ Dashboard, you can simply save them in your Address Book.During the payments process, ensure that you’re sending to the correct address by selecting the saved contact, instead of manual entry for every transaction.

3. Enhance your Payments Review Process

Instead of manually reviewing each payment, create Draft Transactions within your HQ Dashboard, which can easily be approved or rejected by your finance team.Having an extra pair of eyes never hurts.You can further streamline your FinOps by adding notes to contextualise any transaction using our dashboard automate mapping to your Chart of Accounts (COA).

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If you've encountered a similar situation, feel free to reach out to our team here.