Will This $400m ETH Mystery Whale Keep Sitting on His Holding or Make a Market-Shaking Move?

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Fredrik Vold

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Fredrik Vold

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October 23, 2023 07:36 EDT

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A mysterious Ethereum (ETH) wallet worth some $400 million has caught the attention of crypto Twitter. Community members now wonder whether the key is lost, or if the owner is just waiting to make a market-shaking move with the massive stack.

The mystery wallet was created during Ethereum’s initial coin offering (ICO) in 2014, and has never made a transaction. By simply ‘hodling’, the wallet has seen a massive increase in the US dollar value of its ETH tokens, in addition to accumulating more tokens through airdrops.

Among the airdrops is a large Ethereum Classic (ETC) airdrop that added 250,000 ETC tokens to the owner’s address. The 250k ETC alone are now worth some $5.3 million at the current exchange rate.

Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum chain from before Ethereum underwent a hard fork as a result of a critical hacking incident in 2016, the so-called DAO hack.

“One of the most mysterious addresses”

Details about the wallet were shared on Twitter this weekend by Conor Grogan, Coinbase’s Product Strategy Director and a former Senior Manager at Ray Dalio’s hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.

Grogan called the wallet “one of the most mysterious addresses in all of crypto.”

The wallet bought $75k of ETH during the Ethereum ICO (initial coin offering) in 2014, but has since remained “completely untouched,” Grogan wrote in his tweet.

“Imagine the mental fortitude of holding through multiple bull and bear markets,” he added, but also admitted that “a far more likely outcome” is that the private keys to the wallet are lost.

This is the only untouched ICO whale wallet I could find

Imagine the mental fortitude of holding through multiple bull and bear markets. Though the far more likely outcome is they lost their keys 😅https://t.co/emWdt2DL0h

0x2b6ed29a95753c3ad948348e3e7b1a251080ffb9

— Conor (@jconorgrogan) February 26, 2023

“Dead or lost key”

Judging from the majority of commenters on Twitter, it appears Grogan’s explanation is also the consensus view, and that the owner is simply unable to move the funds.

“Dead or lost key. Mystery solved,” wrote the popular user @notsofast, while accusing Rogan of using the wallet mystery for “engagement farming.”

Other users agreed, with many suggesting that the owner is dead.

“RIP the owner who forgot to tell his wallet access info before he passed away,” one user wrote.

Another user suggested that a technical glitch during the Ethereum ICO may have caused an “unspendable error.”

“I know a couple 1 BTC investments that are forever gone with it,” the user suggested, before another jokingly said the wallet has got to be the Ethereum Foundation’s retirement plan…