Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke has sold 92,000 ETH ($11.5 million), crypto publication Cointelegraph has reported.
According to the publication, the core Ethereum developer moved the funds to cryptocurrency exchange Kraken in a transaction completed on December 25.
Prior reports had linked the transaction to Co-founder Vitalik Buterin. However, Jeffrey Wilcke appeared to confirm it was him who initiated the sale via a tweet posted on December 26.
As per his tweet, the Ethereum (ETH) co-founder and developer reportedly sold the ETH to get the money he needs to fund a game he is developing. (A GitHub account linked to Wilcke indicates that the Ethereum developer is a co-founder of the highly publicized Grid Games.)
The Ethereum (ETH) wallet address held over 300,000 ETH
Data on blockchain resource Etherscan also shows that an address associated with Jeffrey Wilcke indeed transferred up to 90,000 ETH to the U.S. based crypto exchange.
But the account held more.
A source at blockchain analytics platform ViewBase notes that prior to the transaction, the said wallet had more than 300,000 ETH. The wallet address now holds 218,000 ETH, worth about $27 million as per current market rates.
Wilcke’s transaction is just one of three massive fund transfers recently sent to cryptocurrency exchanges. One of the transfers involved a transaction to Huobi (99.987 ETH) and another to Binance (25,905 ETH).
In total, about $25.5 million worth of ETH has been moved lately, with the Ethereum community concerned a sell-off was in the offing.
Ethereum worth $100 million
Several transactions originate from the wallet address ox600, a source of many huge Ethereum (ETH) transfers in the past.
Many of these transactions are by the Ethereum Foundation, with co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirming this recently. Etherscan.io shows that the address transferred over 400,000 ETH to the ox600 address in January 2016. The trend has continued through the years, with thousands of ether coins either sold or moved to other addresses.
But the latest sale marks a sharp decline in the pattern. Wilcke’s 90,000 ETH sales come weeks after Buterin revealed that the Ethereum Foundation sold 70,000 ETH, worth close to $100 million in January 2018. At the time Ethereum (ETH) was close to its all-time high price of over $1,400.
Ethereum faces pressure going into 2020, with ETH/USD seeing a 60% decline in 2019. The current price levels are down by over 17% in December alone.
ETH/USD currently trades at $125, way down from its year-to-date (YTD) highs of $335. The crypto also faced a lot of pressure over the past two weeks as concerns mounted over a potential sell-off arising from a 789,000 ETH transfer linked to the Chinese Ponzi scheme PlusToken.
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