Another Inactive Ethereum Wallet Bounces Back after 8 Years, Moves Millions

After eight years of sluggishness, the $1,897 Ether wallet that had been idle since Ethereum’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in 2015 suddenly revived, transferring a total of 8,000 ETH in just two minutes.

8,000 ETH was earned after participating in Ethereum’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in 2015, and the wallet remained inactive until May 27th. On that day, the owner starts by transferring 1 ETH to a new wallet as a precaution. They sent the remaining 7,999 ETH to a new wallet address one minute later.

ETH stock is now valued at around $14.7 million at the time of writing. Lookonchain, a blockchain analytics business, was the first to spot the move and notified its 219,000 Twitter followers. There was a lot of community discussion in the comments section of the post about the reasons for the move. One user speculates that the owner just got released from prison, while another jokes that they moved cash from the old Ledger – a dig at the company’s controversial new Recovery update.

At that time, 8,000 ETH was acquired at a price of $0.31 per token, placing the initial investment at around $2,500. At today’s price of $1,917, the owner has made a profit of 590,000%. This isn’t the only ICO-era Ether wallet to have made a comeback in recent months. Another wallet that got 2,365 ETH ($4.5 million) made its first transaction in over 8 years on April 24, when the owner simply transferred 2,360 ETH to a new wallet address.

After being inactive for five years, another ETH wallet moved 10,226 ETH ($19.6 million) to a new wallet address on March 5th. The new wallet address also has no meaningful transaction history. The only other ETH transaction recorded in the new wallet was a 207 ETH ($380,000) login transaction made just a few minutes ago. Notably, an additional 207 ETH was transmitted from an inactive wallet since June 12, 2017.

According to DeBank’s Web3 wallet tracker, the new wallet also stores $46 worth of memecoin called Gensler (GENSLR) and just $0.24 worth of a dragon-inspired token called Dejitaru Tsuka (TSUKA). The Ethereum ICO took place in two parts. The first step was the pre-sale, which raised $18 million by selling Ethereum tokens to new investors between July 22 and September 2, 2014. For the pre-sale, the prevailing exchange rate was 1 BTC for 2,000 ETH. The second step was the official launch of the Ethereum blockchain on July 30, 2015. As a result, some investors had to wait more than a year to redeem and utilize their ETH.

Inactive wallets containing large amounts of cryptocurrency can wake up for a number of reasons. Inactive wallets can sometimes revive after being hacked. Other times, it’s simply because the owner forgot and, after being rediscovered, thinks now is the perfect time to sell.