8,000 ETH Whale Wakes up After Eight Years

An Ethereum whale that has been dormant for eight years just woke up.

The wallet address was a participant in Ethereum’s Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Until Saturday, it had held onto the 8000 ETH it received in 2015 without sending or receiving any more.

At Ether’s ICO price of 0.311 USD, 8000 ETH would have cost just 2648 USD. At today’s prices, 8000 ETH is worth nearly 15 million USD.

In two transactions, the whale transferred the entirety of their assets to a new wallet. 

Did Ledger Recover Awaken a Sleeping Ethereum Whale?

After the Twitter account Look on Chain alerted followers to the Ethereum whale’s actions, there was speculation that it could be someone transferring their assets from an old Ledger hard wallet.

Ledger’s reputation for secure crypto custody took significant damage last week after the company announced a new feature called Recover.

Recover is intended to act as a cryptographic backup for users’ seed phrases. But after significant backlash from the community, Ledger has put the launch on ice. The company will now wait until the publication of a white paper and further progress on its open source roadmap before launching Recover. 

In a statement on Tuesday, Ledger’s CEO apologized for the security concerns raised over Recover. However, he stood by the new product, arguing that key recovery services are needed to attract and assist new crypto users who may find self-custody challenging.

With criticism of Ledger’s approach rising, rival manufacturers couldn’t resist the opportunity to promote their own alternative wallets.

For example, in one tongue-in-cheek social media post, Trezor highlighted its own open-source credentials just hours after Ledger had promised to accelerate its path to open-source.

“We have decided to accelerate our open-sourcing roadmap to bring more verifiability to everything we do….. Aaaaaand it’s done,” the company tweeted.

Bitcoin Whale Accumulates 31,000 BTC

Away from Ethereum, on Thursday a Bitcoin whale moved over 31,000 BTC from their cold wallets. The combined assets are worth over 822 million USD.

As the blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence highlighted, the Bitcoin holdings were in wallets that had remained inactive since late 2022 when they received BTC directly from Binance and Huobi.

But the assets in question have not been transferred back to an exchange. And it seems as if this whale is just reorganizing their custody arrangements for now.

In other whale activity this week, a Shiba Inu whale moved 499.6 billion SHIB worth 4.24 million USD to the Hotbit crypto exchange.After laying dormant for seven and a half, the whale woke up to transfer SHIB it bought at a higher price a year ago. But why the wallet transferred its assets to an exchange that has just shut down is anyone’s guess.