Decentral Block Post

A wallet address containing pre-mined Ethereum worth $116 million moved its entire stash of 61,216 Ether (ETH) to an address in the Kraken crypto exchange after lying dormant for eight years.

In June 2014, the Ethereum ecosystem conducted a sale event, allowing early team members and co-founders to participate and accumulate pre-mined Ether, at a time when the network was unable to generate tokens on its own.

During the pre-mine period, Ether traded at a price range of $300-$400, which would place the wallet’s worth at roughly $20 million at the time. However, eight years later, the tokens in question are worth more than $116 million at the time of writing.

Etherscan data confirms that the pre-mined 61,216 ETH were transferred on July 18, at 7:30 pm ET to a Kraken wallet address. Sending $116 million in Ether required a minuscule transaction fee of $1.5 and 25.475673161 Gwei in gas price, as shown in the below screenshot.

While the identity of the wallet owner remains unknown, the incident showcases the importance of hodling — an investment strategy that prioritizes the long-term accumulation of crypto tokens.

The second quarter of the year has been a solid one for Bitcoin's performance as its market dominance gained against altcoins which “bled” throughout the quarter according to CoinGecko.

On July 18, the crypto data aggregator released its industry report for Q2 2023 which noted Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) continued to build upon their Q1 gains over Q2.

Meanwhile, Binance Coin (BNB), XRP (XRP) and Cardano (ADA) suffered double-digit losses over that time.

CoinGecko said BNB and ADA saw the largest losses as both were labeled securities in lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens were hit particularly hard during the quarter with Uniswap (UNI), Chainlink (LINK) and Lido (LDO) taking double-digit losses.

Fidelity Digital Assets released a 'Q2 2023 Signals Report' on July 18, which claimed that Ether’s (ETH) outlook for the next 12 months and the long term is positive. Year-to-date, Ether price has gained 62% but while the investment firm might be 'short-term' bullish on Ether, that does not mean they believe that the month-long bullish channel will be sustained.

While institutional investors like Fidelity Digital Assets may have a bullish longer-term vision of ETH price, let’s compare their analysis against network and market data to see if they’re on the money.

Beyond the technical indicators, the rationale behind Fidelity’s report bullish outlook for Ether is the networks’ higher burn rate versus coin issuance, the “new address momentum” and a growth in the number of network validators.

According to the Fidelity report, the net issuance since The Merge in September 2022 resulted in a net supply decrease of more than 700,000 Ether. Additionally, the analysts claim that Glassnode’s increasing Ethereum addresses that transacted for the first time ever proves a healthy network adoption.

The report also points to a 15% increase in the number of active Ethereum validators in the second quarter.