Ethereum Presale what was it?

The Ethereum Presale was conducted in the summer of 2014 Ethereum Foundation. You could send Bitcoin and receive Ethereum encrypted in a json file. The initial price for each ETH was 31cents and payment was done using Bitcoin (BTC). During the presale each bitcoin could buy 4000 ETH, but the price increased as the presale ran for almost two months.

Approximately 9000 fortunate investors saw a significant increase in the price since the ICO’s inception, resulting in a profit of 100 times or even 1000 times for those who delayed accessing their accounts due to forgotten passwords. By the conclusion of the 42-day sale, the Ethereum Foundation successfully raised an impressive $18 million through almost 6700 transactions, selling a total of 51 million ETH.
If you would like to see what addresses were active in the presale, check this link
ETHEREUM BLOCK 0

Ethereum Presale ICO page

Is it possible to crack an Ethereum Presale wallet if password is forgotten?

Yes, if you have the email with the backup json file and some ideas of the password, it is possible to decrypt the wallet.
Unfortunately there are still roughly 500 “locked” or “lost” presale wallets. KeychainX has successfully helped many individuals open their Ethereum presale wallets using custom decrypting tools and algorithms. You can read about one Twitter user here

How long does it take to find the password and unlock the wallet?

It is not possible to determinate time to open a wallet. There are several factors like the quality of your guesses, the format of your common passwords and the length of your password guess. The longest password so far that we unlocked was 99 characters long and had “scrambled” characters. The password was not possible to replicate on a normal English keyboard. The longest wallet took us over 4 years. On general basis we open wallets between 1 day to 1 week. Longer or complex password can take very long time and are due to complexity of the password.

What is needed to open the wallet and export the private key?

To open the wallet you need have the original Ethereum presale json file that was mailed to you. In rare instances, the .json file was not generated correctly and did not contain any funds. The file contains your encrypted private key, which can be imported to wallets like Metamask. Metamask can be found HERE

How can I try to find the password myself?

Yes you can try to recover the enthereum presale password yourself. There are various tools that can help you doing this. One of them is Hashcat that is open source and widely used in the hacker community. It uses the hashmode 16300 and can be downloaded here: Download Hashcat page You can read various tutorials on how to use it on their webpage. Before you can run hashcat with your wallet json file, you will need to convert it to a hash. The easiest tool to do that is John the Ripper repo that is hosted on Github. It can be downloaded here: JTR Github. The tool that you need to run is ethereum2john.py and to execute the command you will need python installed. The command create the has is:
python ethereum2john.py ethereumwalletbackup.json > ethereumwallethash.txt
You can read abour various writeups at hashcat.org

How did the Ethereum ICO webpage look like?

You can view the original Ethereum Presale ICO page here from waybackmachine
https://web.archive.org/web/20140804235628/https://www.ethereum.org/ The webpage showed the price of Ethereum and how many days were left from the presale. You could also see how many people or BTC was committed to the ICO. The starting price increased over time as more people chipped in Bitcoin into the sale.

What was the password requirement for the Ethereum Presale

The password minimum requirement was 10 characters of which there needed to be at least of of;
Small cap letter. Big cap letter. Number. Special character. An example password that would be accepted: P@ssword123!
This example would not be accepted: p@ssword1 or this would also be rejected P@ass1

How can You help me remember the Eth password and remember it?

• Write Down all Passwords you remeber
• Split up the passwords, i.e. if you have a password John123 write one token as John and one as 123
• Write variations of the passwords. If one password is John, do variations like JOHN, john, jOHN, J0hn etc
• Write down other possible password ideas like your pin code to credit cards, phone numbers, nick names and other meaningful to you places or things
• Think outside the box, what would you possible add to the password, when money was involved, that you usually wouldn’t do. Was it the word backwords? or did you loop it twice?
• Now combine all password together
• Try this new list

Why does my password not work to open the Ethereum Presale wallet?

The usual error that was (except of completely forgetting the password) either using a foreign keyboard which generated a “scrambled” password. Another reason could be using special characters that behaves differently depending on your browser, keyboard setup or language setup. Known problem are keyboard on MacBook Pros that were having sticky buttons error. Those generated keys or flipped keys, depending on how fast you wrote.

I never received a JSON file!

Some people claim they did not receive the JSON file that was supposed to be mailed. Most of those cases entered the wrong e-mail. That means your wallet was never mail to your correct inbox. Another known issue is if you were buying in two trenches, the mailed wallet file used the same name and could in rare cases be overwritten when saved to the same folder.

My wallet file is empty, why?

Some purchases did not go through, meaning the wallet json file that was mailed to you contained an address that was never funded with ETH. You need to check the json file, in the section address, add 0x to the string and go to a block explorer like etherscan.io. Paste your address (with the 0x prefix) and you will see if there is any Ethereum in your wallet.

I want to have a zoom call before we hire you, is that possible?

Yes of course. We do frequent video calls with clients all around the world to answer questions or just to put a face to a name. That will make both you and us more comfortable working together.

Eth Hard fork what was it?

The Ethereum hard for occurred when a smart contract was hacked in 2016 and the Ethereum foundation decided to reverse the transaction by forking and splitting the chain. This caused the chain to split into Ethereum Classic which was the original chain with the hack transaction online. The new chain kept the name Ethereum.

Any questions on your mind don’t hesitate to contact us, we have helped hundreds of people worldwide since 2017.
Contact us: keychainx@protonmail.com if you need to talk about wallet recovery.

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