Pre-Mining Era ETH Worth $116M Moves Wallets

A wallet holding pre-mined Ethereum worth a massive $116 million that lay dormant for eight years made an unexpected move on July 18. It transferred all its 61,216 Ether to an address on the Kraken crypto exchange.

This sudden activity marks the end of a long-term holding strategy and an impressive case of token value appreciation.

💤 💤 💤 💤 💤 💤 💤 💤 💤 💤 A dormant pre-mine address containing 61,216 #ETH (116,396,127 USD) has just been activated after 8.0 years!https://t.co/f79T0fYa7b

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 18, 2023

Ethereum ran a sale event back in 2014, allowing early participants to buy pre-mined Ether. Ethereum was incapable of generating tokens independently nor was it used for any real use cases during that time, making this event a necessity:

“Ether will NOT be usable or transferable until the launch of the genesis block. That is to say, when you buy ether and download your wallet, you will not be able to do anything with it until the genesis block launches.”

The value of Ether at the time of pre-mining was between $300 and $400, roughly valuing the wallet at about $20 million. Now, after eight years, the value of those same tokens has ballooned to over $116 million.

To facilitate this enormous transfer, the transaction fee was a mere $1.68, or 0.00088 ETH, and the gas price was 25.475673161 Gwei, or 0.00000002547 ETH, according to Etherscan.

While the identity of the wallet owner remains unknown, their careful approach to the transfer process was noted: A test transaction of 0.05 ETH was sent to the Kraken address prior to the large-scale transfer, presumably to ensure a smooth and error-free process.

This investor held their ETH for eight years, meaning that the mysterious ETH owner is a good example of hodling — a popular investment strategy in the crypto community to “hold on for dear life” to your tokens. The method focuses on not selling cryptocurrency over an extended period, allowing the value to appreciate.

The sudden activity of this dormant wallet raises numerous questions about the owner’s identity and their intent. Ether is worth $1,897.93 at the time of writing amid speculation of a looming bull market.