After eight years of inactivity, a wallet address containing pre-mined Ethereum worth $116 million transferred its entire stash of 61,216 Ether to an address on the Kraken crypto exchange.
The Ethereum ecosystem held a sale event in June 2014, allowing early team members and co-founders to acquire pre-mined Ether when the network could not generate tokens on its own.
During the pre-mine period, the price of Ether fluctuated between $300 and $400, valuing the wallet at approximately $20 million. However, eight years later, at the time of writing, the tokens were worth more than $116 million.
The pre-mined 61,216 ETH were transmitted to a Kraken wallet address on July 18 at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time, according to Etherscan data. As shown in the screenshot below, sending $116 million in Ether required a negligible transaction charge of $1.5 and 25.475673161 gwei in gas price.
While the wallet owner remains unknown, this demonstrates the significance of holding, an investment strategy prioritizing the long-term accumulation of cryptocurrency tokens.
The above screenshot demonstrates that the owner of 61,216 ETH took precautions to prevent any loss of funds due to human error. Before initiating the whale transaction, transmit 0.05 ETH to the Kraken address in a test transaction.
On July 18, at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about the difficulties of implementing a new blockchain feature.
According to Buterin, account abstraction extensions, commonly called “paymasters,” permit users to pay their fees with “whatever coins they are transferring.”
Along with the potential benefits of account abstraction for users, Buterin acknowledged that developers must still overcome obstacles, such as requiring an Ethereum Improvement Proposal to convert current Ethereum externally-owned accounts — regular user accounts — into intelligent contracts and ensuring that the protocol functions similarly in layer-2 solutions.
