An Ethereum whale that has been dormant for eight years just made a remarkable move this week. 8,000 ETH would have only cost $2,648 from the ICO, but the current value is closer to $15 million.
A wallet address that is predicted to have purchased Ethereum from its initial coin offering (ICO) is back up and running. As of Saturday (May 27), this wallet stored 8,000 ETH transferred in 2015 without sending or receiving any more.
Based on Ether’s ICO price of $0.311, an estimated 8,000 ETH will only cost $2,648. But at today’s prices, 8,000 ETH is worth nearly $15 million. In two transactions, this Ethereum whale moved all his assets to a new wallet.
Coins that have been moved from old wallets are often considered a bad sign. This is usually a signal that the owner is transferring ETH to an exchange in preparation for a huge profit. The sales of these coins can have a significant impact on putting pressure on the price of ETH in the market.
But there are also cases where owners occasionally move their Ethereum to new addresses to keep their assets more secure. In theory, this action should not affect the price of ETH in the market. However, the above action may be intended to distract the community. As a result, ETH holders often continue to watch for the next moves of these perennial ETH whales.
DOES LEDGER RECOVERY WAKE A SLEEPING ETHEREUM Whale?
After the Twitter account Look on Chain warned followers about the actions of Ethereum whales, there was speculation that someone might be transferring their assets from an old Ledger cold wallet.
Ledger is well known for the safety of crypto custody. But the wallet developer’s reputation took a significant hit after the company announced a new feature called Recover.
The Recover feature is intended to act as a cryptographic backup of the user’s secure 14-word phrases. But after backlash from the community, Ledger halted the launch of the feature. Now, the company will wait until the white paper is published and work further on its open source roadmap before rolling out Recover.
In a statement on Tuesday, Ledger’s CEO apologized for the security concerns caused to Recover. However, he is in favor of the new product, arguing that key recovery services are needed to attract and support new crypto users who may have trouble self-regulating.
With criticisms of how Ledger Recover is promoted, rival manufacturers couldn’t miss the opportunity to promote their own alternative wallets.
For example, in a social media post, Trezor highlighted its own open source credentials just hours after Ledger promised to accelerate the road to open source.
The company tweeted:
We decided to accelerate our open source offering to bring more verifiability to everything we do… Aaaaa and it’s done.
BITCOIN Whales EARN 31,000 BTC
In addition to Ethereum, on Thursday, a Bitcoin whale transferred more than 31,000 BTC from their cold wallet. Total assets worth more than 822 million USD.
As blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence highlighted, Bitcoin wallet holdings have remained dormant since late 2022 when they received BTC directly from Binance and Huobi.
But the mentioned assets have yet to be moved to the exchange. It seems that for now, this whale is just looking for a solution to store assets more securely.
In another whale activity this week, a Shiba Inu whale transferred 499.6 billion SHIB worth $4.24 million to cryptocurrency exchange Hotbit.
After sitting motionless for more than seven hours, the whales woke up to transfer the SHIB they had purchased for more than a year ago. But why the whale wallet moved assets to an exchange that just closed is hard to guess.