Vitalik Denies $92K ETH Sent to Kraken Belongs to Him Jonathan Ganor 2019-12-26 11:39:14 1274 views

Will the Whale Be Identified?

Ethereum had a pretty rotten 2019. The first smart-contract supporting cryptocurrency struggled to gain steam while Bitcoin regained some of its value lost in 2018. Ethereum is still trading at $127 but lost some of its BTC evaluation.

It has also gone through two different hard forks in 2019 with an additional hard fork planned on January 1st 2020.

Recently yet another move has been made that could hypothetically hurt Ethereum.

The Massive 92,000 ETH Dump

Recently a wallet containing a very large amount of Ethereum since the 2nd of August 2016 has moved some of its Ethereum to Kraken. This has been an amount of 92,000 ETH or the equivalent of roughly $11 million USD. The wallet has a remaining balance of 218,738 ETH remaining currently.

The age of this wallet and its massive amount of Ethereum leads to 3 possibilities:

a) The wallet belongs to none other than Vitalik Buterin

b) The wallet belongs to the Ethereum Foundation or a developer

c) A mysterious whale dumped the funds

Many have taken to Twitter and have vocally accused Vitalik Buterin of selling off his Ethereum. Vitalik claims innocence and stated that it could have been an exchange.

Yeah I have no idea what that address is. Possibly someone mistook some exchange's intermediate address for my own. â vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 26, 2019

Vitalik's claim seems rather unlikely once the history of the wallet is looked into. It seems a bit farfetched that an unknown exchange would simply hold onto such a large amount of Ethereum and not move it.

Exchanges are known to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, not hold onto them for years like a financial custodian. It is unlikely however that a financial custodian would be the case as crypto storage services were extremely rare in 2016.

One will see what the future holds for Ethereum.

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