An Ether (ETH) wallet that has been dormant since the Ethereum ICO (initial coin offering) in 2015 has suddenly woken up after eight years of inactivity, moving a total of 8,000 ETH in just two minutes.
He wallet he received the 8,000 ETH after participating in the Ethereum ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in 2015 and remained inactive until May 27. That day, its owner started with a preventive transfer of 1 ETH to a new wallet. A minute later, they transferred the remaining 7,999 ETH to the new wallet address.
At the time of writing, the ETH stash is worth approximately $14.7 million.
This transaction was first noticed by the blockchain analytics service lookonchainwho informed his 219,000 Twitter followers of the transfer.
An Ethereum ICO participant who has been inactive for 8 years woke up today.
transferred the 8000 $ETH($14.7M) to a new address.https://t.co/1griKB9Te9 pic.twitter.com/1bvQh3zsqY
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) May 28, 2023
In the comment section of the post, there was some speculation from the community as to the reason for the transfer. a commentator He suggested that the owner had just been released from prison, while another made a humorous comment observation that they were transferring funds from an old Ledger, a scathing comment on the company’s controversial new Recover update.
At the time, the 8,000 ETH was purchased at a price of just $0.31 per token, putting the initial investment amount at around $2,500.
At current prices of $1,917, this marks a staggering 590,000% profit for the owner.
This is not the only Ether wallet from the ICO era that has reawakened in recent months. On April 24, another wallet which received 2,365 ETH ($4.5 million) made its first transaction in almost 8 years, after the owner transferred just 2,360 ETH to a new wallet address.
On March 5, another ETH wallet transferred 10,226 ETH ($19.6 million) to a new wallet address after sitting dormant for five years.
The new wallet address also has little significant transaction history. The only other ETH transaction recorded in the new wallet is an incoming transaction of 207 ETH ($380,000) that took place just minutes before the most recent transfer. In particular, the additional 207 ETH were sent from another wallet which remained completely inactive since June 12, 2017.
Related: Arbitrum-based Jimbos Protocol Hacked, Losing $7.5M in Ether
Interestingly, the new wallet also contains $46 worth of a memecoin called Gensler (GENSLR) and just $0.24 worth of a dragon-inspired token called Dejitaru Tsuka (TSUKA), according to data from Web3 DeBank wallet tracker.
The Ethereum ICO occurred in two main stages. The first stage was the pre-sale, and between July 22 and September 2, 2014 the sale of Ethereum tokens to new investors raised $18 million. The current exchange rate for the pre-sale was 1 BTC, for 2000 ETH. The second stage was the official launch of the Ethereum blockchain which occurred on July 30, 2015. This meant that some investors waited over a year to be able to redeem and use their ETH.
Dormant wallets with large sums of crypto can wake up for a variety of reasons. Sometimes dormant wallets wake up because they have been hacked. Other times, it’s simply because the owner may have forgotten about it and, upon rediscovering it, has decided that it might be a good time to sell.
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