The mystery of 12 million ETH
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Blue Fox Notes
On July 30, 2015, at 3:26 pm London time, there were 8,893 transactions on Ethereum, and the first transaction amounted to 1337eth. The Ethereum genesis block was just created, and with it, a large amount of eth was distributed to nearly 9,000 accounts.
There is little analysis of this historic moment, but 72 million eth was created that day. Among them, 60 million eth was transferred to 9,000 accounts, and the founding team received 12 million eth.
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Since then, the ethereum supply has increased by 40 million, and about four and a half years on now, those 9,000 accounts initially received more eth than were added.
However, as early as 2015, many early buyers who participated in the crowdfunding of the Ethereum project through Bitcoin sold eth for a few cents.
Ethereum genesis buyers sold eth for less than $1 in December 2015
Like the guy above who sold nearly $1 billion worth of eth at one point in time via Kraken for just $600,000. Yet another Genesis buyer turned pennies into millions, and while he also sold at various bottoms, the total was huge.
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What this person intends to do with the huge sum of money is still unknown. What's more, it's unclear what happened to the original 12 million eth received by the Ethereum founding team. (Blue Fox Note: A few days ago, someone in the community claimed to have discovered that Jeff Wilcke, the former developer of Ethereum and one of the early founding members, had sold 90,000 eth on an exchange, worth $11 million)
On August 8, 2015, addresses starting with 0x5 received 11,901,464.23948 eth. The payment is sent in full to the "EthDev" contract within hours of receipt.
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Ethereum Foundation contract address, December 2019
For example, by August 17, 2015, approximately 5 million eth were moved, and by December 2015, only 2 million eth remained. By the middle of 2016, the Ethereum Foundation had only 1 million eth left, and now it is about 600,000 eth or so.
Where did the 11 million eth go? this is a problem. This is a problem because they appear to be taking steps to conceal the flow of these funds.
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This is the first 300 days Ethereum has spent. Three million here, a million there, but not really anywhere.
These movements appear to be the distribution of funds for code execution. It's not clear exactly what the claim process is, but let's use 0x5 as an example:
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Initial Distribution of Ethereum
As you can see here, there is a certain velocity in the flow. In fact, back in 2015, 1 million eth was distributed in just one day.
Thus, four other accounts received around 100,000 eth or more, also seen as advances, even though the ethereum roadmap has barely started.
There are four accounts in the screenshot above, which shows that there are many people who receive huge upfront payments for just a year or two of programming.
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Upfront advance payment received by V God
Here are some of the funds Vitalik Buterin has received, and many others have also received tens of thousands of eth.
Who are these people? How much eth did they receive? Why? That's the question, and perhaps more importantly, what are they doing now?
We know that Wilcke left the founding team to start his game. This situation is very common, and he is not an exception. Almost all of them have left to start new things after acquiring millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
This makes it difficult to manage the development ecology of the Ethereum protocol. Péter Szilágyi described his team leadership position at the Ethereum Foundation and described what went wrong with eth1x:
“I think the problem stems from the fact that everyone wants to jump on the Eth2 train. This has been all the rage for the last two years and it just takes the attention away from a system that still actually works today. The people who stay are so fragmented that You can't notice everything."
Wilcke of course coded geth. That's why he's getting those millions of dollars in payouts, but right now, he'd rather be busy with the gaming thing than work for something he used to get paid for.
