A “mystery solved”: Coinbase director Conor Grogan has revealed the name of the owner of the $470 million ETH crypto wallet: it is LHV Bank founder Rain Lohmus, but he claims to have lost his private key and cannot access his Ether.
Summary
LHV Bank founder loses private key to access $470 million ETH crypto wallet
A few days ago, Coinbase CEO Conor Grogan posted a tweet claiming to have found the owner of the $470 million ETH crypto-wallet. He is Rain Lohmus, founder of the Estonia-based LHV Bank, but he seems to have lost his private key.
“A mystery solved: This address (which now contains $450 million in cryptocurrency) belongs to Rain Lohmus, founder of LHV Bank. Unfortunately, he has lost his keys and cannot access this 100 million. If you can somehow help him get them back, he is willing to share them with you.
One of the most mysterious addresses in all of cryptocurrency: Bought $75,000 worth of ETH during the ’14 ICO. Portfolio completely intact; never made a single transaction. Portfolio now worth over $400 million, a 5333x increase. Received $6.5 million in airdrops from hodling alone (an 87x on the initial investment alone).”
Grogan had already highlighted the Whale crypto wallet in February last year, pointing out that it had not been touched since the advent of the Ethereum blockchain.
Indeed, the purchase of the 250,000 Ether took place at the time of Ethereum’s initial offering, when ETH was worth $0.30 (for a total of $75,000), after which there were no further withdrawals or outgoing transactions.
On the contrary, Lohmus’s crypto wallet received a further $6.5 million in airdrops just by holding his Ether.
LHV Bank founder loses keys to his whale crypto wallet
The tweet shared by Grogan refers to an interview Rain Lohmus gave to News ERR last October.
And indeed, on that occasion, Lohmus reportedly claimed that he had lost the private key to his 250,000 ETH crypto-wallet, and that he would not even make much effort to retrieve it.
The founder of LHV Bank also said that he could not solve this problem alone, and that if anyone wanted to help him, he would accept any offers.
Here is what Lohmus then added about blockchain:
“I absolutely agree that this is a very weak point of this system, which makes you think that this perfect decentralization has other risks that you don’t usually think about. But it’s very common for me to lose passwords.”
Going back to Grogan’s tweet, from purchase to date, Lohmus’ crypto wallet Whale has made a profit of 5333 times. Not only that, but at ether’s peak price of around $4,900 on 10 November 2021, Lohmus’ reserves were worth $1.22 billion.
Former Ripple CTO also loses private key to his 7,002 BTC Bitcoin wallet
Recently, Stefan Thomas, the former CTO of Ripple, also made headlines with a very similar story to Lõhmus: he lost his private key and cannot access his Bitcoin Wallet hardware.
In this case, however, it seems that the recovery company Unciphered has offered to decrypt the device in order to release the 7,002 BTC still inside.
The bitcoin wallet hardware in question is IronKey, and there are only two attempts to guess the password, after which the data could be wiped if the individual enters the wrong password.
