According to recent information from Arkham, the five largest crypto investors with publicly available wallet addresses are estimated to possess around $3.5 billion worth of digital assets in total.
A few sit on a digital treasure trove but have no way to access it.
Locked Out of Crypto Fortune
This list showcases some of the leading figures in the industry, including Justin Sun of TRON, Rain Lõhmus from LHV Bank, Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum, Stefan Thomas, a German programmer who used to be Ripple‘s CTO, and James Fickel, a crypto venture capitalist. They are all prominent players in the field.
Despite holding large fortunes, approximately one-third of Rain Lohmus and Stefan Thomas’s wealth is out of reach due to misplaced passwords for their digital wallets. Their current holdings amount to $793 million for Lohmus and $452 million for Thomas. Together, they control about 35% or $1.24 billion of the total identified riches of the top five cryptocurrency hoarders.
In simpler terms, private keys are like the unique codes that allow people to unlock and manage their cryptocurrencies. These codes give full control and ownership over the funds, so losing them means being locked out of your digital assets, making them impossible to access or recover.
Many people have owned these Bitcoins since its creation ten years ago, a period when few believed that the crypto market would carry much worth.
Lohmus reportedly lost track of his cryptocurrency keys, resulting in his inability to reach his stored funds. He acknowledged owning a wallet with 250,000 ETH, which he earned during the 2014 ICO, but showed no interest in recovering it.
In an interview, the Estonian bank’s founder shared that he was open to hearing from professionals who could help him recover his cryptocurrency assets that had been lost.
Irony in IronKey: Even Ripple’s Ex-CTO Can’t Crack Vault
In the year 2011, Thomas, a previous employee of Ripple, was given 7,002 Bitcoins as compensation for producing an instructional video regarding Bitcoin. Sadly, he misplaced the means to access these Bitcoins later in the same year after forgetting the password to the encrypted IronKey drive that housed the necessary private keys.
In October 2023, crypto security specialists at Unciphered claimed they could provide a significant solution to bypass the encryption on Thomas’s IronKey and help him recover his Bitcoin assets. However, Thomas rejected their assistance and instead hired two other parties – cybersecurity firm Naxo and independent researcher Chris Tarnovsky – with incentives for them to crack open the drive instead.
There’s been no news of success from these parties so far.
Read More
- PENDLE PREDICTION. PENDLE cryptocurrency
- CKB PREDICTION. CKB cryptocurrency
- EUR INR PREDICTION
- USD VND PREDICTION
- USD DKK PREDICTION
- BONE PREDICTION. BONE cryptocurrency
- CSIX PREDICTION. CSIX cryptocurrency
- PBX PREDICTION. PBX cryptocurrency
- FIO PREDICTION. FIO cryptocurrency
- W PREDICTION. W cryptocurrency
2024-04-16 18:24