Jeff Wilcke, the co-founder of Ethereum, is held responsible for selling 92,000 ETH. The address that sent the ETH had received 408,000 ETH in 2016.
On Wednesday, December 25th, a single address sent a total of 92,000 ethers (ETH) to the exchange Kraken. Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum’s main developers and visible face of the project, was held by some people responsible for sending that amount.
It was reported that the amount of 92,000 ETH was sent in a total of two transactions. The first was just 0.1 ETH whilst the second was 91,999.9 ETH, as can be corroborated through the Etherscan explorer.
The amount of ethers sent to the exchange represents USD 11,822,920, a price reflected by the cryptocurrency at the time of writing this article, according to LiveCoinWatch data.
The platform ViewBase points to Vitalik Buterin or some Ethereum developer as the possible responsible for sending the aforementioned ethers. To issue such a claim, they start from the fact that that address was financed with about 408,000 ETH sent from one of Buterin’s addresses in 2016.
Some media go further, holding Jeff Wilcke, co-founder of Ethereum, responsible for sending the 92,000 ETH to the exchange Kraken since they say that the address belongs to Wilcke.
Apparently, the developer himself has responded affirmatively to the accusation through his Twitter account, even though the tweet no longer appears on the network. The only evidence left is a screenshot of the alleged tweet.
In that post, Wilcke would have admitted sending the ethers, claiming that he needed money for the development of a game. It is worth mentioning that the developer also actively participates in the development of video games, as indicated by his introduction on Twitter.
Imminent Drop of Ether’s Price
In the controversy over the sale of such a massive sale, the possibility that it affects the price of the cryptocurrency is the most prominent. An obvious example of this is what is occurring with XRP, the native token of the Ripple network.
The Ripple team unlocks 1,000 million XRP per month, claiming that its purpose is to increase liquidity by the demand for the cryptocurrency. However, this has led to a constant depreciation of the crypto asset in the market, to the point that XRP investors have requested to stop this practice.
After the sale of the 92,000 ethers, the concern about the future of ETH increases, since there were at least two other large transactions registered in the Ethereum blockchain, destined for an exchange house. ViewBase noted that Huobi reached almost 100,000 ETH, while another 25,900 ETH went to an address of the exchange Binance.
Until now, no negative impact on the price of ETH has been observed but rather there has been an increase of 1.28% in recent days, according to data from LiveCoinWatch.
Controversy in Ethereum
This has not been the only controversy of the Ethereum project, since on December 24th, on Christmas Eve, it was announced that a new hard fork will be implemented in the platform at the beginning of January, less than a month after the successful execution of the Istanbul fork.
It should be noted that this new update, called Muir Glacier, will delay the Ethereum mining difficulty bomb, something that has already occurred three times.
The announcement did not please many in the ecosystem, with complaints about the implementation of two forks with such a short time difference. Also, they expressed their discomfort as this occurred during festive dates when nodes are unlikely to be updated.
By Willmen Blanco
