How much presale ETH has never moved: 12 years on

The Ethereum presale ran for 42 days from 22 July to 2 September 2014, selling roughly 60 million ETH at about $0.31 each and raising around 31,500 BTC. Buyers received their allocations in the genesis block when the network launched in 2015 — and a striking number of those wallets have not moved since. We scanned the presale genesis addresses to measure exactly how many, and how much ETH is sitting in them with no move outs.

The headline numbers

You may have seen a smaller, widely-repeated figure — roughly 521,574 ETH (about $939 million) across some 621 wallets. That number comes from an earlier, stricter test: counting only the presale addresses whose sole transaction is the incoming genesis allocation. It is a defensible definition, but it has a blind spot — it discards any wallet that ever received anything afterward (an airdrop, a stray transfer), even when the owner has never sent a single transaction out. Those coins are just as untouched; the wallet simply isn’t free of incoming history.

That single methodological choice is the whole difference: it restores the handful of very large, never-spent wallets that the older count drops, which is why our figure is 1,555,414 ETH rather than ~521,000. We’d argue it is the more complete measure of presale ETH that has genuinely never moved — and either way, we publish the method (nonce == 0 across the genesis presale addresses) so the two can be compared directly.

The 2014 presale, 12 years on

At presale prices, 1 BTC bought 2,000 ETH at the start, declining to 1,337 by the close — roughly $0.31 per ETH. The sale was the second-largest crowdfund in internet history at the time. It was also unforgiving: there were no accounts and no password resets, only a wallet file you had to keep. The Ethereum Foundation’s own sale announcement warned buyers plainly not to “lose your wallet file or your password” — or they would never access their ether. Twelve years on, the wallets that never moved are the quiet evidence of how many did exactly that, or simply held and walked away.

How we measured it

Our method is deliberately simple and checkable:

• We took the 2014 Ethereum presale genesis-block allocation addresses — approximately ~8,893 in total.
• For each, we read the account’s transaction nonce. A nonce of 0 means the address has never broadcast an outgoing transaction — the allocation has never been spent or moved by its owner.
• We recorded each address’s ETH balance as of July 2026.

Balances and nonces are public and reproducible on any Ethereum node or explorer, so anyone can verify these figures.

The breakdown

Dormant wallets by balance band :

The dormancy is strikingly concentrated. The 30 largest wallets — those holding 10,000 ETH or more — account for 958,620 ETH, nearly 62% of the dormant total, and the ten biggest alone hold 636,621 ETH (about 41%). At the other end, 187 wallets under 100 ETH hold barely 0.4% between them. The lost-and-forgotten presale ETH is dominated by a handful of very large early buyers — the biggest being the 250,000-ETH wallet attributed to Rain Lõhmus.

The wallets waking up (2025–2026)

The dormant pool isn’t frozen. After a decade of silence, a trickle of these presale wallets has started to move. In 2025, 19 of them stirred for the first time and sent out roughly 52,700 ETH — led by a single wallet that moved 40,000 ETH after ten years untouched. In the first part of 2026, another 10 have woken, moving about 15,200 ETH more, one of them around 10,000 ETH. Together that is 29 wallets and roughly 67,900 ETH — on the order of $122 million at current prices — coming back to life after a decade.

The pattern is telling: 21 of the 29 were emptied almost completely, swept down to a near-zero balance rather than nudged — which is what a recovered wallet or a long-planned exit looks like, not a routine transaction. Only a handful moved part of their balance and still hold ETH. Every one of these awakenings makes the same point the data does: dormant is not gone. With the wallet file and the password, a presale wallet can return to life at any time — which is exactly the line between the lost and the merely forgotten.

Dormant vs. lost — an honest reading

It’s important to be precise: a nonce of zero proves a wallet has never moved, not that it is lost. The dormant set is a mix. Some are deliberate long-term holds — earlier this year a single presale wallet that had sat untouched for a decade moved 13,000 ETH, a choice, not an accident. Some addresses may belong to the foundation or early contributors. But a meaningful share are almost certainly lost or forgotten: wallet files misplaced, passwords forgotten, presale JSONs abandoned on old drives. We can’t label each one from the outside — and we don’t. What the data shows is the size of the pool; how much of it is recoverable is a case-by-case question.

In practice the dormant pool splits three ways: owners who lost the wallet file entirely (gone for good — no one can help), owners who still have the file but forgot the password (often recoverable), and deliberate long-term holds. Only the middle group is a recovery question at all.

The losses are real: documented cases

This isn’t abstract — the public record is full of people who lost, or still can’t reach, their presale ETH:

• The presale’s most famous lost wallet. Rain Lõhmus, founder of Estonia’s LHV Bank, bought 250,000 ETH for about $75,000 in the 2014 presale and lost access to the wallet. It has never moved — Coinbase’s Conor Grogan publicly traced it as one of the largest ETH addresses in existence. At mid-2026 prices (ETH ~$1,800) that stake is worth on the order of $450 million — and it topped $1 billion at ETH’s 2025 highs, a reminder that the sums here move with the ETH price. It is the single biggest wallet in this very dataset, and its owner has openly said he’d welcome help recovering it.
• A family locked out of ~$6 million. A widely-reported case of a family who took part in the original presale and still cannot access roughly $6 million in ETH.
• $400k deleted with an email. A 2017 Hacker News post from a buyer of 1,970 presale ETH who left the wallet in a Gmail message and deleted it in 2015 while clearing his inbox. By 2017 it was worth ~$400,000; a Google engineer confirmed the deleted mail was long gone. The file itself was lost — the unrecoverable kind.
• “Can ethereum.org just re-send it?” A recurring question on Ethereum Stack Exchange and elsewhere. The answer is no: the foundation kept no copy and, by design, cannot reconstruct a lost wallet.
• Zeroed allocations. Even the allocation itself had edge cases. The ethereum genesis-block generator documents how late, post-sale purchases were handled, and at least one buyer’s genesis address ended up with a zero balance — a reminder that not every purchase made it cleanly into a funded wallet.

Independent estimates echo the scale: Grogan has put the total ETH lost forever at more than 900,000. The through-line across every case is the same — the presale offered no second chances, so whether a dormant wallet can be recovered depends entirely on what its owner still holds.

Where the wallet file still exists, the odds are far better than owners assume. The reason so many “correct” presale passwords fail is now well documented: the wallet was encrypted by 2014 browser JavaScript and is decrypted today by modern tools, so a single non-ASCII character can end up as different bytes than were originally stored. We maintain a full catalog of these presale password bugs, compiled from the original presale source code and the Ethereum Foundation’s own “wrong password” investigation — Unicode NFC/NFD normalisation (the dominant cause), macOS smart quotes and dead-key accents, keyboard-layout remaps, and even a stray keystroke captured during the presale’s mouse-entropy step. See the full catalog of presale password bugs and our Ethereum presale recovery guide for how these cases are solved.

If one of these wallets is yours

If you took part in the 2014 presale and still have your wallet file, a forgotten password is often not the end. The presale format — the encseed in your ethereum_wallet_backup.json — is recoverable with a hint-driven search, and a large share of “my password is right but it won’t open” cases are simply text-encoding mismatches we can reproduce. See our Ethereum presale recovery guide for how it works, and our note on weak-randomness wallets for the related 2011–2015 issue. If the file is truly gone, no one can recover it — but far more presale wallets are recoverable than their owners assume.

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