12 million ETHs have been transferred to the Ethereum founding team, and now the flow has become a difficult mystery

At 3:26 pm London time on July 30, 2015, 8893 transfers occurred on the Ethereum network, and the first transfer amount was 1337 Eth.

Image source: pixabay

At that time, the genesis block of Ethereum was just launched, and then Eth was distributed to nearly 9,000 accounts on a large scale.

• Top 10 keywords for blockchain 2019: Libra, DC / EP, 10.24 speech, IEO in the list
• These articles break the common N Bitcoin rumors
• Messari founder's latest report: Is there still hope for DeFi in 2020?

Although there was little analysis of this historic moment, 72 million Eths were created that day, of which 60 million were distributed to these 9,000 accounts and 12 million were transferred to the founding team.

Ethereum supply map for December 2019

Since then, the supply of Ethereum has increased by more than 40 million pieces, and more than four and a half years have passed. These 9,000 initial accounts are still receiving Eth now.

However, many early investors who participated in the Ethereum ICO with Bitcoin sold Eth all the way back in 2015 for a few cents.

Ethereum's original investors sell eth at a low price, December 2019 screenshot

Like the investor above, he sold about $ 600,000 of Eth through the Kraken exchange, and these Eths were later worth close to $ 1 billion.

However, another founding buyer did turn a few dollars into millions of dollars. Although he also sold at a different bottom, he sold a lot.

Ethereum's founding investors made a lot of money. December 2019 screenshot

What this person intends to do with this mountain of money is unknown. More importantly, it is unclear what happened to the earliest 12 million Eths received by the Ethereum team.

On August 8, 2015, an address starting with 0x5 received 11,901,464.23948 Eth.

Within a few hours of receiving this Eth, it was all sent to a contract called EthDev on the same day.

Ethereum Foundation contract address. December 2019 screenshot

They spend quite a bit of Eth in the short term, and the speed at which they spend it makes the chart above look interesting.

For example, by August 17, 2015, about 5 million Eths were transferred out of the address. By December of that year, there were only 2 million Eth left on the address. By mid-2016, the Ethereum Foundation had only 1 million Eths left. The current figure is about 600,000.

Where did the 11 million Eths transferred out? This is the problem, and the problem is because they seem to have taken some measures to confuse the flow of these funds.

Ethereum Foundation transfer chart within 300 days

This is the first 300 days of spending. There are 3 million here and 1 million there, but it's not really known where they spend it.

These flows appear to be fund allocation through code execution. What is the exact process is not clear, but let us look at the address starting with 0x5.

Ethereum initial distribution diagram

As you can see here, the speed of these capital flows is notable. In fact, in 2015, one million Eths were distributed in just one day.

Now we know that the address starting with 0x600 is Jeffrey Wilcke, and he is one of the six (specific unknown) co-founders who decided to sell Ethereum on Christmas Day.

So, although Ethereum's roadmap has barely started, the roughly 100,000 or more Eths received by the other four accounts are also probably prepayments.

There are four screenshots like the one above, which shows that many people get huge prepayments in just one or two years of programming time.

Vitalik Buterin receives advance payment

Here are some of the funds that Vitalik Buterin received, and there are many more who have received tens of thousands of Eth like him.

Who are these people? How much eth did they receive? Why did I receive so many? This is the problem, and the more important question may be what are they doing now?

We know Wilcke is going out for a game project. He also received many Eth like many people, without exception.

Almost everyone started to do other things or other projects after cashing in millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

This makes the Ethereum protocol development ecosystem difficult to manage. Péter Szilágyi, who claims to be the team leader of the Ethereum Foundation, described what went wrong with Ethereum 1.0:

"I think the problem stems from the fact that everyone is riding the Ethereum 2.0 train. This has been all the rage for the past two years, it just diverts people's attention from the system that is really running today. The people left behind are too few I ca n’t concentrate on everything. "

Wilcke did participate in the development of Geth. That's why he got millions of dollars, but now he would rather play games than work to make money.

However, many things remain unknown. Is there a contract? Who and whose contract? What are the terms? Are there any conditions? Has this contract been violated?

Literally, maybe not, but in the court of public opinion, it must have been violated because those payments were based on a complete commitment to the Serenity roadmap, a copy of which was owned by all of them or Implied or explicit commitments.

They have gained so much. Not only did they not use their knowledge or even their talents. Perhaps more importantly, they did not educate the new generation of inheritance skills, but spoiled themselves.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!