Ethereum Co-Founder Confirmed to Be Behind Mysterious $11M ETH Selloff on Kraken

We now can say for sure that it was an Ethereum co-founder who tried to slyly sell off his ETH stash during the holiday. Yesterday, on Christmas day, over 204,000 ETH was moved to various exchanges in a mysterious transfer that was linked to Vitalik Buterin himself. Many were speculating that the ETH was either owned by Buterin or by an Ethereum developer. From this stash, 90,000 ETH was sent to Kraken which has now been linked to an Ethereum co-founder. The identity of the mysterious transferer was none other than Ethereum co-founder, Jeff Wilcke. Around 90,000 ETH ($11M) owned by Wilcke was sent to Kraken. The transfer would have been left anonymous had it not been for the fact that Wilcke signed up for Ethereum Name Service (ENS) two years ago. It’s currently unclear who was behind the other Ethereum transfers on Christmas Day, however. Embarrassed, Wilcke took to Twitter to confirm that it was him. He apparently needed the money to fund his ‘game.’ Although the tweet is now deleted, it was captured in a screenshot.

You are right. Nothing goes unnoticed, @jeffehh.

Given that you were awarded so much $ETH, you should use that money to help Ethereum. pic.twitter.com/OARA4etUn1

— Richard Burton (@ricburton) December 26, 2019

Why Wilcke needs $11M to fund his game is not certain, but it seems clear that he has effectively left the project entirely after cashing out. He still owns a sizeable amount of Ethereum, but he has been entirely inactive on Ethereum’s GitHub since March of this year. Rather than reinvent in the project, he has instead decided to enrich himself extremely handsomely—and on Christmas, no less. The sell-off by the Ethereum co-founder is yet another blunder in a long list of issues that have been coming to a head as the industry grows more frustrated. BeInCrypto reported earlier this month that even Ethereum 2.0 will likely be delayed, possibly for “many years.” At the time of writing, the project is up 2.6% on the daily and is trading at $129.78. Relative to Bitcoin, it is currently at low levels not seen since March 2017.