Dormant Ethereum Genesis Wallet Awakens

Turkey, 29th Nov 2023, King NewsWire – Ethereum ICO: The Ethereum ICO was a wildly successful initial coin offering that took place in 2014. The ICO raised over $18 million for the initial release and development of Ethereum by its development team consisting of Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and Joseph Lubin. Participants at the time contributed Bitcoin in exchange for Ethereum at a predetermined exchange rate. Ethereum eventually launched in July of 2015, roughly a full year from the ICO in July of 2014 at a price of $0.31/ETH. After years of inactivity, many ICO wallets awaken from the dead and begin to trade, invest or move their huge ETH holdings around at random times. These are always important to note as these early investors have seen exponential growth in their investments.

The ICO wallet

Ethereum ICO participants received their allotted tokens via a Genesis transaction in July of 2015, at Ethereum’s launch. These are easily recognizable as they do not have a typical transaction ID and occurred at Block 0, the Genesis Block, for Ethereum.

Recently, a dormant Ethereum ICO wallet (Address 0x6eb3819617404058268f0c3cff3596bfe9148c1c | Etherscan) has sprung back to life and seems to be moving around some of its original 1,670 Ethereum from the Ethereum ICO in 2015. Let’s call this wallet ‘ICO wallet’.

The ICO wallet first received 1,670 ETH on July 30th of 2015 on the Genesis Block, likely indicating it to be an ICO participant. Three months later in October of 2015 the ICO wallet sent 1,669.5 ETH to the exchange Kraken. This wallet then laid dormant for the next eight years until November 27th, 2023 when they funded a new wallet (Address 0xe5171cea84e8787e8abc09df401933213a62563e | Etherscan). Let’s call this wallet ‘Wallet 2’.

Wallet 2

Wallet 2 was a brand-new address originally funded with the left over 0.5 ETH from the ICO wallet that was not sent to Kraken. Wallet 2 was then funded with 20 ETH on two separate occasions from the exchange Kraken for a total of 40 ETH. So, this wallet is linked to not only the ICO wallet but also to the same exchange the ICO wallet used for its original storage of 1,669.5 ETH.

Wallet 2 has used this 40 ETH to purchase Creso ($CRE) with four separate market buys of 10 ETH each. Wallet 2 currently holds $80,000+ of $CRE with no other transactions at the time of this writing. Could this wallet still have another 1,630 ETH to fund itself from Kraken?

Creso, the project that Wallet 2 has continued to buy touts themselves as: ‘the future of smart wallets. No seeds, no gas fees, and no fear’. Creso intends to make a smart wallet that leverages ERC-4337, social recovery and account abstraction to become a new generation of crypto wallets where funds are safer, easier to access and more user friendly for public adoption.

Social recovery has been a hot topic that Vitalik and many others have been consistently discussing, particularly as of late. See a quote below where Vitalik discusses this exact topic in article from November 27th, 2023 (My techno-optimism (eth.limo)):

This is where my own emphasis on cryptographic technologies such as blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs comes in. Blockchains let us create economic and social structures with a “shared hard drive” without having to depend on centralized actors. Cryptocurrency allows individuals to save money and make financial transactions, as they could before the internet with cash, without dependence on trusted third parties that could change their rules on a whim. They can also serve as a fallback anti-sybil mechanism, making attacks and spam expensive even for users who do not have or do not want to reveal their meat-space identity. Account abstraction, and notably social recovery wallets, can protect our crypto-assets, and potentially other assets in the future, without over-relying on centralized intermediaries.

As Vitalik and other early Ethereum team members, investors and advisors continue to discuss this social recovery concept Creso seeks to implement, the more promising Creso looks for a future at the top of the crypto hierarchy.

Links

ICO wallet:

Address 0x6eb3819617404058268f0c3cff3596bfe9148c1c | Etherscan

Wallet 2:

Address 0xe5171cea84e8787e8abc09df401933213a62563e | Etherscan

Creso Socials, documentation and other links:

creso (@cresowallet) / X (twitter.com)

Creso

CresoWallet (Creso Wallet) · GitHub

Vitalik Social Recovery discussions:

Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets (vitalik.ca)

My techno-optimism (eth.limo)