REFERENCE · DATA STUDY · ETHEREUM PRESALE

How Much Ethereum Presale ETH Has Never Moved — 12 Years On

On 22 July 2014 the Ethereum presale opened. Twelve years later, 621 of the original genesis wallets have still never sent a single transaction — holding 1,421,008 ETH, about $2.7 billion, untouched since the beginning. Here is the data, freshly verified on-chain, and what it means.

Original KeychainX data · Scanned 19 July 2026 (ETH = $1,930) · Wallet recovery since 2017

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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 every presale genesis address to measure exactly how many, and how much ETH still sits in them with no outgoing transaction at all. Every figure below was checked on-chain on 19 July 2026, with ETH at $1,930.

The headline numbers

• Genesis presale addresses scanned: 8,893
• Never sent a transaction (nonce = 0): 621 (7.0%)
• ETH still dormant in those wallets: 1,421,008 ETH
• Value at 19 July 2026 (ETH = $1,930): ~$2.7 billion
• Share of presale ETH untouched: ~2.4% of the ~60M sold

You may have seen a smaller, widely-repeated figure — roughly 521,000 ETH across some 620 wallets. That number comes from an earlier, stricter test: counting only 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, a spam token — even when the owner has never sent a single transaction out. Those coins are just as untouched; the wallet simply is not free of incoming history.

Why our total is higher. The largest dormant wallet of all makes the point. Rain Lõhmus’s 250,000-ETH address has never broadcast an outgoing transaction — yet it has quietly collected airdropped tokens for a decade. The “only one transaction” test excludes it; a “never sent anything” test includes it. We measure the latter — nonce = 0, no outgoing transaction — which is the truest on-chain signal that an owner has never moved their coins. We publish the method so the two definitions 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 among the largest crowdfunds 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 their wallet file or 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 reproducible:

1. We took the 2014 Ethereum presale genesis-block allocation addresses — 8,893 in total.
2. 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.
3. We recorded each address’s ETH balance as of 19 July 2026, and, for any wallet that had moved, the date and size of its first outflow.

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

The breakdown

Dormant wallets by balance band:

ETH balance band	Dormant wallets	ETH held	% of dormant ETH
10,000+ ETH	29	825,321	58.0%
1,000–10,000 ETH	202	525,698	37.0%
100–1,000 ETH	200	63,256	4.5%
10–100 ETH	186	6,733	0.5%
Under 10 ETH	4	~0	0.0%
Total	621	1,421,008	100%

The dormancy is strikingly concentrated. The 29 largest wallets — those holding 10,000 ETH or more — account for 825,321 ETH, about 58% of the dormant total, and the ten biggest alone hold 523,322 ETH (about 37%). At the other end, 186 wallets under 100 ETH hold barely half a percent 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 is not frozen. After a decade of silence, a growing trickle of these presale wallets has started to move for the first time. We verified each one’s first-ever outflow date on-chain, so this counts genuine awakenings — wallets that were untouched for a decade and then moved — not addresses that had been active all along.

• In 2025, 20 presale wallets moved for the first time, sending out about 52,755 ETH — led by a single wallet that moved 40,000 ETH after ten years untouched.
• In 2026 so far, another 10 have woken, moving about 15,164 ETH more, one of them 10,000 ETH.
• Together that is 30 wallets and roughly 67,900 ETH — on the order of $131 million at current prices — coming back to life after a decade.

The pattern is telling: 22 of the 30 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 eight 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.

Some of these awakenings are recoveries. KeychainX has opened several of these 2014 presale wallets for their owners during this 2025–2026 window — cases where the wallet file survived and a forgotten or mis-typed password was the only thing standing between the owner and a decade-old balance.

Dormant vs. lost — an honest reading

It is 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. 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 JSON files abandoned on old drives. We cannot label each one from the outside, and we do not. 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 is not abstract — the public record is full of people who lost, or still cannot 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 $1,930 (19 July 2026) that stake is worth on the order of $483 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 dataset, and its owner has openly said he would 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 account from a buyer of 1,970 presale ETH who left the wallet in a webmail message and deleted it while clearing an inbox. The file itself was lost — the unrecoverable kind.
• “Can the foundation just re-send it?” A recurring question on forums. The answer is no: the foundation kept no copy and, by design, cannot reconstruct a lost 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 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.

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. If the file is truly gone, no one can recover it — but far more presale wallets are recoverable than their owners assume.

Frequently asked questions

How many Ethereum presale wallets have never moved?
By our 19 July 2026 scan of the 2014 presale genesis addresses, 621 have never sent a single transaction (nonce zero), holding roughly 1,421,008 ETH (~$2.7 billion at ETH $1,930). Never-moved is a factual on-chain state; whether each is lost or simply held long-term varies.

Does never-moved mean the ETH is lost?
No. It means the owner has never spent or moved it. Some is deliberately held; some is lost; some is recoverable.

Can a lost 2014 presale wallet be recovered?
If the wallet file still exists, often yes — especially “wrong password” cases caused by 2014-era character-encoding bugs. If the file itself is gone, no.

How was this measured?
We read the transaction nonce and ETH balance of every 2014 presale genesis address on a mainnet node on 19 July 2026 (ETH = $1,930), and verified the first-outflow date of every wallet that has moved. The method is fully reproducible.

Took part in the 2014 presale?
If you still have your presale wallet file but not the password, tell us what you remember — especially the language and keyboard you used. Honest assessment within 24 hours, and you pay only on success. Contact KeychainX →

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Data and methodology: KeychainX scanned all 8,893 Ethereum presale genesis addresses on 19 July 2026 (ETH = $1,930), reading each account’s nonce and balance and verifying first-outflow dates on-chain. Figures move with the ETH price and with each wallet that wakes; we will update this study as the dormant pool changes.

A note for journalists and outlets: This study and its data are free to re-post, quote, and republish, in whole or in part, with attribution to KeychainX (keychainx.io). The underlying address-level data is available on request. For comment, verification of any figure, or follow-up questions, contact Peter M., CFO of KeychainX, at mail@keychainx.io.

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