After eight years of lethargy, an Ether $1,897 wallet that had been idle since Ethereum’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in 2015 has suddenly revived, transferring a total of 8,000 ETH in only two minutes.
The 8,000 ETH were obtained after participating in Ethereum’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in 2015, and the wallet remained dormant until May 27. On that day, its owner started by transferring 1 ETH to a new wallet as a precaution. They sent the remaining 7,999 ETH to the new wallet address one minute later.
The ETH stockpile is now valued at around $14.7 million at the time of writing. Lookonchain, a blockchain analytics business, was the first to discover the move and notified its 219,000 Twitter followers. There was considerable community discussion in the post’s comments section about the rationale for the move. One user speculated that the owner had just been freed from jail, while another joked that they were moving cash from an old Ledger – a dig at the company’s contentious new Recover update.
At the time, the 8,000 ETH was acquired at $0.31 per token, putting the initial investment at roughly $2,500. At today’s pricing of $1,917, the owner has made a whopping 590,000% profit. This isn’t the only ICO-era Ether wallet to resurface in recent months. Another wallet that got 2,365 ETH ($4.5 million) made its first transaction in over 8 years on April 24, when the owner moved just 2,360 ETH to a new wallet address.
After lying inactive for five years, another ETH wallet moved 10,226 ETH ($19.6 million) to a new wallet address on March 5. The new wallet address similarly has nothing in the way of meaningful transaction history. The only other ETH transaction recorded in the new wallet is a 207 ETH ($380,000) inbound transaction done only a few minutes ago. Notably, the extra 207 ETH were transmitted from a wallet that has been dormant since June 12, 2017.
According to Web3 wallet tracker DeBank, the new wallet also holds $46 worth of a memecoin named Gensler (GENSLR) and just $0.24 worth of a dragon-inspired token called Dejitaru Tsuka (TSUKA). The Ethereum ICO took place in two parts. The first step was the pre-sale, which raised $18 million by selling Ethereum tokens to new investors between July 22 and September 2, 2014. For the pre-sale, the going exchange rate was 1 BTC for 2,000 ETH. The second step was the July 30, 2015, formal launch of the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, some investors had to wait more than a year to redeem and utilize their ETH.
Dormant wallets containing large amounts of cryptocurrency may awaken for a number of causes. Dormant wallets may sometimes revive after being hacked. Other times, it’s just because the owner forgot about it and, upon re-discovery, thought that now is a good time to sell.
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