Dormant Ethereum Wallet From ICO Era Abruptly Wakes Up After Eight Years With 588,609% Gains

An original Ethereum (ETH) investor moved about $14.7 million worth of the leading altcoin this weekend after sitting on it for nearly eight years.

A participant in ETH’s 2014 initial coin offering (ICO) received 8,000 ETH from the Ethereum genesis block in July 2015, then held it until this past Saturday, when the large entity unloaded all of the Ethereum to an unknown wallet.

Crypto tracker Lookonchain first reported the transaction.

An Ethereum ICO participant who has been dormant for 8 years woke up today.

He transferred all 8000 $ETH($14.7M) to a new address.https://t.co/1griKB9Te9 pic.twitter.com/1bvQh3zsqY

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) May 28, 2023

Blockchain-tracking service Etherscan shows that the deep-pocketed investor paid a little over $1 to process the large ETH transaction.

The Ethereum initial coin offering price was around $0.31, compared to $1,825 at the time of the transaction on Saturday, meaning the value of the ICO participant’s 8,000 ETH skyrocketed from around $2,480 at time of purchase to about $14.7 million nearly eight years later, an eye-popping increase of about 588,610%.

At Ethereum’s all-time high price of $4,878, which it hit in November 2021, the 8,000 ETH would have been worth more than $39 million.

The receiving wallet appears to have been created for the recent transactions. The address also received 207.8 ETH from a third unknown wallet on Saturday, and it currently holds around 8,207.8 ETH worth more than $15.5 million, according to Etherscan.

Ethereum is trading at $1,892 at time of writing. The second-ranked crypto asset by market cap is up 2.5% in the past 24 hours and nearly 6% in the past seven days.

Generated Image: Midjourney