Cryptocurrency Whales Have Over $1.2 Billion They Can’t Access

Large cryptocurrency investors holding significant amounts of digital assets, estimated to be approximately $1.24 billion, are currently unable to access their funds, based on recent information disclosed by Arkham Intelligence regarding the holdings of major whale investors.

According to available data, the wealthiest cryptocurrency investors, referred to as “whales,” collectively hold approximately $3.5 billion in cryptocurrencies. Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, is at the helm with a staggering $1.1 billion under his control. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, also makes it to this elite list.

Our team created a dashboard of 10 of the richest individuals with crypto holdings tagged on Arkham.

The top 5:

Justin Sun ($1.1B)
Rain Lohmus ($793M – inaccessible)
Vitalik Buterin ($782M)
Stefan Thomas ($452M – inaccessible)
James Fickel ($446M)

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) April 15, 2024

Based on available information, the fortunes of Rain Lõhmus, founder of LHV Bank, and Stefan Thomas, ex-CTO at Ripple, are currently unable to be accessed, as they collectively control over $1.24 billion in cryptocurrencies. Due to the inherent characteristics of the cryptocurrency industry, these funds remain completely out of reach.

Lohmus is currently locked out of his cryptocurrency fortune worth approximately $793 million due to misplacing his private keys. He’s said to possess around 250,000 ETH that he obtained during an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2014. Lohmus has shown a willingness to collaborate with experts and share a percentage of the funds as a reward for successfully recovering his lost crypto assets.

In 2011, Stefan Thomas, who previously served as CTO of Ripple, was paid 7,002 Bitcoins for developing instructional material on Bitcoin. Unfortunately, he misplaced the access to these funds after failing to remember the password for an IronKey hard drive where the cryptocurrency’s private keys were stored.

In the previous year, Unciphered, a company specializing in cryptocurrency security, proposed attempting to hack into a hard drive; however, this proposal was not accepted. Instead, they chose to collaborate with a cybersecurity firm and an individual researcher on the issue. Yet, the status of the case appears unresolved.

Read More

2024-04-17 06:20