Pre-mined Ethereum wallet worth $116.3m wakes up

A pre-mined Ethereum address holding 61,216 $ETH has been activated recently after eight years of dormancy. 

Pre-mined wallet addresses refer to wallet addresses that hold tokens that were acquired before the official launch of a network. They are typically obtained through methods such as initial coin offerings (ICOs) or allocated to early investors, founders, or development teams. 

The whale moved ETH, now worth about $116million to Kraken exchange on 18 July 2023 at around 11:30:23 PM +UTC. As a standard precautionary measure, the user first transferred a small amount of 0.05 ETH to Kraken before sending the entire ETH.

Early Ethereum whales reactivating 

In November last year, Whale Alert similarly flagged a transaction from a pre-mined Ethereum address that had been dormant for seven years.

Blockchain security firm Peckshield revealed that the ETH worth over $630k at the time was transferred to a wallet with Ethereum Name Service (ENS) username ‘williamsutanto.eth’.

A month before this, another dormant pre-mined address holding 200 ETH worth about $280k at the time was activated after seven years.

Twitter users make jokes at Vitalik

Twitter users have taken to making lighthearted jokes, speculating that the activated wallet belongs to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. Their reason being that at the early stages of Ethereum, only the founders held enough confidence in the project to make substantial bets on its success.

Another user joked saying “Vitalik found another dusty ledger under his bed,” after a pre-mine Ethereum wallet was activated last year.

At the time of writing, the price of ETH is trading at $1,909.88, up 0.62% in the past day. It has a circulating supply of 120,199,213 and is crypto’s second-largest coin on the market, with a cap of $229,651,811,148. Its all-time high happened two years ago on 16 November 2021 when it reached $4,891.70, about 60.95% more than where it is trading today.