Sleeping Crypto Giant Wakes: Early Ethereum Investor Turns $620 Into $5M Fortune
An early Ethereum investor just woke up to a life-changing surprise—their $620 gamble ballooned into a $5 million windfall. Talk about hitting the crypto jackpot while taking a nap.
From coffee money to generational wealth
The anonymous hodler''s 2015 investment now stands as a masterclass in patience outperforming panic. While Wall Street fund managers were busy collecting 2% fees for mediocre returns, this crypto pioneer rode Ethereum''s 8,000x ascent without breaking a sweat.
The ultimate ''set it and forget it'' play
This fortune wasn''t built through day trading or DeFi yield farming—just old-fashioned conviction in disruptive tech. The investor''s cold wallet became a time capsule of crypto''s explosive growth, outshining traditional assets like stocks, gold, and even that beachfront property your financial advisor recommended.
As banking institutions scramble to launch their own tokenized assets, this story serves as a delicious reminder: sometimes the best investment strategy is simply getting in early...then accidentally forgetting your password for a decade.
A Long Sleep Ends
According to blockchain data tracker Lookonchain, the dormant wallet first signaled life by moving a tiny fraction of ETH, just 0.002 coins, less than an hour before the main deposits started. Then, over the past two days, the holder systematically split and transferred the whole stash to Binance across multiple transactions, the largest being nearly 1,000 ETH.
Even though this movement of funds has coincided with a period of intense volatility for ETH caused by geopolitical shockwaves from the ongoing military conflict between Israel and Iran, the ethereum veteran could make as much as $5.2 million from their holding, potentially selling each coin for more than $2,600 as things stand, after buying them for approximately $0.31 a piece in 2014.
Ethereum Price Action
The Israel-Iran conflict saw the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap plunge dramatically, falling from $2,760 to a low of $2,470 within hours.
The more than 10% drop erased ETH’s recent surge to a 15-week high near $2,830. Additionally, over $1 billion in Leveraged positions across the market were liquidated, with Binance data revealing concentrated ETH long liquidations between $2,650 and $2,430.
Following the retracement, Ethereum has shown a measure of resilience, climbing about 3.2% over the past week to stay head and shoulders above the wider crypto market, which dipped roughly 2.7% in the same period.
At press time, the asset was up 3.9% in the last 24 hours, hovering around $2,616, after oscillating between $2,494 and $2,628. Still, the altcoin is down 26.6% across the past 12 months, and more than 46% shy of its all-time high of $4,878 set some three years ago.
