Coinbase Executive Finds $320K in Crypto Belonging to a ‘Stranger’

Coinbase head of product Conor Grogan says he found $322,000 worth of digital assets that belonged to a person he was unaware of as the funds were transferred after the Ethereum hard fork in 2016.

The executive learns that the owner of the crypto repository had previously become a victim of hackers, who wiped out his entire life’s savings.

Lucky day for many investors, thanks to Grogan

coinbase director announced On Twitter he tracked down “6+ figures” for those who forgot they had funds on chain or didn’t realize they were given some tokens via airdrop.

One reason individuals may have been sitting on large sums of money without knowing it is because of Ethereum’s hard forking event in 2016, when the protocol split into Ethereum Classic (with the native token ETC) and Ethereum ((ETH).

“ETH Forked in 2016; If you have balance, you will be credited 1:1 ETC. My thesis is that a lot of people have no idea they were in the snapshot,” Grogan explained.

Twitter user Griff Green is one such person who had 23 ETH but was never known to exist. Due to the increase in the price of Ether over the years, the reserves are currently worth about $45,000 (up 7,400% from $600 at the time).

Grogan’s biggest find was an account that held over $320,000 worth of ETC. While finding the owner was no easy task, he stumbled upon “a unique coin” called EOSDAC. The token was broadcast on Ethereum to EOS holders in 2018, allowing Grogan to connect the dots and find the lucky one.

Looks like luck finally smiled on the latter, seeing as they fell victim to a hacker in 2019, resulting in the loss of all their life savings. Furthermore, the person was also involved in a legal battle with cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.

Grogan posted a screenshot of a conversation between himself and the person in question, which showed that the person had no knowledge of the existence of those properties.

Several Twitter users commented below the post, highlighting Grogan’s act. Chief Strategy Officer at Binance Patrick Hillman Was one of them.

Ethereum Classic: The Original Form of Ethereum

Ethereum Classic is an open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency platform that runs smart contracts. Despite being less popular than Ethereum, it is considered by some to be the original version of the blockchain protocol.

It was formed as a result of a major attack in 2016 called “The DAO Hack”. The DAO, a decentralized venture fund used by Ethereum investors, at one point had accumulated over 11 million ETH. However, hackers found the cracks and took away about a third of those assets.

Most DAO members wanted the stolen funds returned to investors, but not all agreed. This led to the split of Ethereum Classic (which says “the code is the law”) and Ethereum.

The former has a native token called ETC, which has no competition with ETH but has been trending lately. It currently trades around $20, while its market capitalization is less than $3 billion (according to CoinGecko data).