A wallet participating in Ethereum’s Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in 2016 remained completely inactive until 23 April 2023, when it made a transaction.
After 7 years and 7 months, the address contains 2,363 ETH, amounting to $4.42 million today.
Ethereum Initial Coin Offering: a participant’s address activates after 7 years and 7 months
Apparently, some people have waited more than 7 years to finally experience their fortune. Indeed, one ETH address participating in the Initial Coin Offering in 2016 had been inactive until 23 April 2023, when it made its first transaction.
On-chain analytics company Lookonchain tracked it on etherscan and posted the incredible awakening on Twitter:
Basically, the address that has been dormant since the ETH ICO, back when it received 2,365 ETH for a counter value of $733.51, now contains the equivalent of $4.42 million in ETH.
After all, the price of ETH during its Initial Coin Offering was $0.311. Instead, the price of ETH on the day of its transaction was $1,840. This means that the owner of that address, scored an ROI of almost 600,000%.
Ethereum Initial Coin Offering and the other cases of awakened wallet addresses
This alert far surpasses the inactivity of other Ethereum wallets, given that we are talking about the time of its Initial Coin Offering.
Indeed, as early as last December, there were other inactive accounts awakened, though “only” from October 2018.
The total transferred was 22,982 ETH, the equivalent at that time of $27.2M. The transactions saw Ether being moved to new ETH addresses.
Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade
The choice of this period to reactivate the inactive wallet from the Ethereum Initial Coin Offering, could be attributed to the latest news regarding the crypto: its latest Shanghai or Shapella update.
Indeed, along with last year’s Merge fork, with the Shapella fork came the completion of ETH’s Proof-of-Stake protocol.
Just two weeks ago, Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895 enabled the fork on the blockchain so that users and validators could withdraw their staked ETH on the network.
The Merge had served to change the protocol from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and to enable staking.
To be an Ethereum validator, 32 ETH must be staked. Now for Shapella-activated withdrawal, validator users can decide whether to withdraw in partial mode, so as to maintain the balance of 32 ETH, or in full mode, so as to exit staking.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2023/04/26/news-ethereum-initial-coin-offering/