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Ethereum ICO Participant Wakes From 8-Year Slumber
Pre-mining era Ether, worth an eye-popping $116 million, moved wallets on July 18 after laying dormant for eight years, Etherscan data shows. The wallet transferred all of its 61,216 ETH to an address on the Kraken exchange. On that day, its owner began with a cautionary transfer of 0.05 ETH to the Kraken address before proceeding to make the large-scale transfer.
Notably, moving $116 million worth of ETH required a mere transaction fee of $1.68 and 25.475673161 Gwei in gas price.
The Ethereum network held a sale event back in June 2014, allowing co-founders and early participants to purchase pre-mined Ether. This event was necessary because the Ethereum ecosystem couldn’t generate tokens on its own during this time and was also not being utilized for real use cases.
During the pre-mine period, the 61,216 Ether was bought at a price of between $300 and $400, which places the initial investment amount at around $20 million. At today’s price of $1,908, the value of those tokens has risen to over $116 million within the eight-year period.
The owner of the wallet remains unknown as of publication time. Still, holding his stash for eight whole years demonstrates the extent of hodling — a popular investment strategy in the crypto community that prioritizes the long-term accumulation of crypto tokens.
Dormant wallets with huge sums of crypto can resurrect for a string of reasons. Sometimes they have decided to cash in on big price increases. Other times, it’s simply because the owner may have been hacked. Nevertheless, such dormant whales’ actions can substantially impact the market and investor sentiment. Monitoring any possible ripple effects from this latest multi-million-dollar transaction will be fascinating.