Coinbase executive Conor Grogan stated on Tuesday (7th) on the X platform that the owner behind the mysterious whale address holding 470 million US dollars worth of Ether (ETH) is Rain Lõhmus, the founder of the Estonian bank LHV Bank, but unfortunately, Lõhmus has lost the private key to the address.
Grogan had previously mentioned in February of this year that this whale address purchased $75,000 worth of ETH (a total of 250,000 tokens) during the initial coin offering (ICO) of Ethereum in 2014, and has never executed a transaction since the blockchain’s genesis.
Based on a report from Estonian media ERR News, Grogan concluded that the aforementioned whale address belongs to Rain Lõhmus. In this report, Lõhmus mentioned that he had a wallet containing 250,000 ETH, but has lost the password to this wallet.
However, Lõhmus stated that he has not put much effort into recovering the funds, but is willing to pay someone capable of rescuing them, saying:
Lõhmus also mentioned that losing passwords is common for him and added that losing access to funds is a “weakness” of blockchain systems.
When the price of Ether reached a historical high of nearly $4,900 in November 2021, the wallet mentioned above was valued at $1.22 billion, and still boasts an impressive 628,757% return. According to information shared by Grogan in February, the wallet also holds $6.5 million worth of “airdrop” tokens.
More than 900,000 ETH has been permanently lost. Conor Grogan stated that the total amount of permanently lost ETH has reached at least 886,000 tokens, valued at over $1.63 billion, including the 250,000 ETH belonging to Rain Lohmus.
After adding some additional addresses (including the lost ETH of crypto custody company Prime Trust), Grogan mentioned that the total amount of permanently lost ETH is 909,800 tokens, valued at over $1.73 billion, accounting for over 0.75% of the total circulating supply.