Coinbase Executive Tracked Down Lucky Person Unaware of $322k Ether Holding

Updated: 07 July 2023

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage

A Coinbase executive tracked down a lucky crypto investor who had the call of a lifetime this week when informed of a $322k holding of Ether the person didn’t know about.

The same person had previously lost his or her life savings in a hack, said Conor Grogan, director of product strategy & business operations at Coinbase. The amazing tale was revealed in a Twitter thread posted by Grogan that detailed his unexpected discovery and an ensuing quest to identify the rightful owner.

Forgetting Six-Figure Amounts in Ether

According to a Cointelegraph report, the Ethereum blockchain was forked in 2016 with the birth of Ethereum Classic (ETC). This hard fork mandated that every ETH holder on-chain be awarded a similar number of tokens in ETC.

I found $322k for a stranger who previously lost their life savings in a hack pic.twitter.com/K1gUqEkAPh

— Conor (@jconorgrogan) July 5, 2023

The person had long since forgotten about the investment. Grogan said that’s not surprising because investors sometimes forget funds they have on-chain, with some also unaware of airdrops.

“To start, I went through the ETC rich list, looking for accounts that never touched their ETC balances,” Grogan recounted. “I found about 20 targets that held significant (250k+) ETC balances and no activity on ETC. I then spent time combing through each, hoping for some way I could track them down.”

Tracking down addresses with a significant number of ETC tokens was no easy feat. Grogan encountered many “dead ends” discovering an address with the prefix “0x475.” At first, the director was disappointed, but then he stumbled onto “a unique coin” he had never seen or heard of called “EOSDAC.”

He later uncovered that EOSDAC was a token that had been airdropped on the Ethereum blockchain in 2018.

EOS holders registered their ETH address to get the airdrop. Using the airdropped amount and the snapshot date I then I had a connection to an EOS wallet

As it turns out, this EOS wallet has quite the history! pic.twitter.com/Py3TLR24fa

— Conor (@jconorgrogan) July 5, 2023

Coinbase’s Grogan Made Second Amazing Discovery

As Grogan scratched his head to unearth the mystery behind the treasure wallet, he learned “that the owner of 0x475 had their life savings stolen by a hacker in 2019 and was in a legal battle with their cybersecurity provider as well as with Bitfinex.”

Armed with this crucial piece of information, Grogan managed to identify the wallet holder and subsequently made contact. “Hopefully, I’ve made his day,” he said.

Conor discovered several Poloniex wallets with “significant untouched ETC balances.” He requested the exchange to reach out directly for the full list, and the funds were fully recovered, with Grogan going home with a handsome tip.