Rain Lohmus: Lost ETH Wallet is now worth $1 Billion

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Rain Lohmus bought $75,000 worth of ETH in the 2014 ICO when the token was valued at roughly $0.30. The founder of LHV Bank subsequently lost the private keys to the wallet. 

ETH’s recent surge to $4,653 at the time of writing means that the wallet with 250,000 tokens in it is now worth over $1 billion. 

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Lohmus has admitted to not putting much effort into recovering his lost keys despite the large fortune. The lost wallet has more ETH tokens than the official wallet of Vitalik Buterin. 

Lohmus said in an interview it is very common for him to lose passwords and has offered half the value of the wallet to anyone who can help him recover it. 

He also criticised private keys as a weak point of the cryptoecosystem: 

“Perfect decentralization has other risks that you don’t usually think about. But it’s very common for me to lose passwords. I went to renew my ID card passwords today; if it were crypto, I’d be in a big crisis again, but luckily the police and border police work.”

The price of one Ethereum token has surged 53% in the last month off the back of ballooning interest in newly-approved Ethereum ETFs, institutional uptake, and several large acquisitions from Ethereum whales. 

Arkham Intel recently uncovered large inflows into the BlackRock ($640M), Fidelity ($270M), and Grayscale ($80M) ETFs.

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The plight of Rain Lohmus is similar to that of James Howells who recently gave up trying to retrieve his lost hard drive with 8,000 BTC on it. 

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Howells hard drive was mistakenly thrown away by his ex-girlfriend and the Welshman has been locked in a 12-year battle with Newport City Council in an attempt to retrieve it from the tip. He has even offered to buy the dump site where he believes the hard drive is located. 

Howells wallet is now worth $952M at the time of writing.