A wallet address containing pre-mined Ethereum worth $116 million recently moved its entire stash of 61,216 Ether to an address on the Kraken crypto exchange. This wallet had been dormant for eight years before this transaction took place.
During a sale event in June 2014, early team members and co-founders of the Ethereum ecosystem were allowed to accumulate pre-mined Ether when the network couldn’t generate tokens on its own. At that time, Ether was trading at $300–$400, making the wallet’s value roughly $20 million. However, after eight years, the value of these tokens has appreciated to more than $116 million.
The transfer of the 61,216 ETH to the Kraken wallet address occurred on July 18 at 7:30 pm Eastern Time. Remarkably, the transaction required only a small fee of $1.5 and 25.475673161 gwei in gas price.
The identity of the wallet owner remains unknown, but the move highlights the significance of hodling, an investment strategy focused on long-term accumulation of cryptocurrency tokens. The owner took a cautious approach to avoid any losses due to human error, first initiating a test transaction with 0.05 ETH to the Kraken address before proceeding with the main transaction.
In a separate event, at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris on the same day, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin discussed challenges in implementing a new feature on the blockchain. He mentioned “paymasters,” also known as account abstraction extensions, which would allow users to pay their fees with the coins they are transferring. While this feature could offer potential benefits for users, developers need to overcome challenges such as upgrading current externally-owned accounts (normal user accounts) into smart contracts through an Ethereum Improvement Proposal and ensuring compatibility with layer-2 solutions.
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