According to CryptoPotato, recent data from Arkham indicates that the top five identified crypto whales, with publicly known wallet addresses, collectively hold approximately $3.5 billion in digital assets. However, some of these whales are unable to access their digital wealth due to lost passwords to their digital wallets. Among these are prominent industry figures such as TRON’s Justin Sun, LHV Bank’s Rain Lõhmus, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas, and crypto venture capitalist James Fickel.
Rain Lõhmus and Stefan Thomas are in a unique situation, unable to access their holdings, which currently stand at around $793 million and $452 million, respectively. This represents about 35% or $1.24 billion of the total holdings of the top five identified whales. Private keys, which serve as the digital signature granting access to users’ crypto holdings, are the sole means of control and ownership over these funds. Therefore, losing these keys results in a virtual lockout from one's assets, making them effectively inaccessible and irretrievable.
Many individuals have held these funds since the inception of Bitcoin ten years ago, a time when there was little confidence in the crypto industry's potential value. Lõhmus, for instance, allegedly misplaced his private keys, leaving him unable to access his funds. He admitted to owning a wallet containing 250,000 ETH, which he earned during ICO 2014, but has not made any effort to retrieve it. He has, however, expressed willingness to consider offers from experts who might assist him in reclaiming his lost cryptocurrency wealth.
Former Ripple executive Thomas, who received 7,002 BTC in 2011 as payment for creating an educational video about Bitcoin, also lost access to his funds after forgetting the password to an IronKey encrypted hard drive containing the private keys. Crypto security experts at Unciphered offered potential assistance in October 2023, claiming they could bypass Thomas’s IronKey and help him regain access to his Bitcoin fortune. However, Thomas declined Unciphered’s help and instead reportedly engaged two other teams – cybersecurity firm Naxo and independent researcher Chris Tarnovsky – offering them rewards for unlocking the drive. There’s been no news of success from these parties so far.
