KeychainX: 1.42M ETH From 2014 Presale Still Dormant, $131M Woke Up in 2026
On-chain scan of 8,893 genesis wallets finds 621 never moved a single ETH in 12 years — while 30 stirred in 2025-26.
A twelve-year-old cohort of Ethereum’s earliest wallets is still sitting almost entirely untouched. A new on-chain audit by Swiss wallet-recovery firm KeychainX found that 621 of the network’s original 2014 presale addresses — 7% of the 8,893 it scanned — have a transaction nonce of zero, meaning they have never broadcast a single outgoing transfer since the genesis block was mined in 2015.
Those 621 wallets hold 1,421,008 ETH between them, worth roughly $2.7 billion at the $1,930 price KeychainX used for its July 21, 2026 valuation. On-chain balances were pulled on July 19, 2026. The dormant stash equals about 2.4% of the roughly 60 million ETH sold across the presale’s 42-day run, from July 22 to September 2, 2014, at approximately $0.31 per token, a raise that totaled around 31,500 BTC.
A wider net than earlier estimates
KeychainX’s figure is notably larger than commonly cited numbers of roughly 521,000 ETH across about 620 addresses. That earlier methodology only counted wallets whose sole recorded transaction was the incoming genesis allocation — excluding any address that later received an airdrop, spam token or unsolicited transfer, even if the owner never moved a single wei out. By reading nonce values instead, KeychainX captured every wallet that has never sent funds, regardless of what landed in it afterward. The gap is illustrated by a 250,000-ETH wallet that has quietly accumulated airdropped tokens for years without ever broadcasting an outgoing transaction — a holding that older counting methods would have missed entirely.
Concentration at the top of the stack
The dormant supply is heavily concentrated. Just 29 wallets holding 10,000 ETH or more account for 825,321 ETH, or 58% of the total, and the ten largest alone control 523,322 ETH. Wallets in the 1,000–10,000 ETH band add another 525,698 ETH (37%), while the 200 wallets holding 100–1,000 ETH contribute 63,256 ETH, or 4.5%. Everything below 100 ETH — 190 wallets combined — accounts for barely half a percent of the dormant pool.
Thirty wallets stirred in 2025 and 2026
The pool isn’t frozen. By checking each address’s first-ever outflow date, KeychainX isolated genuine awakenings from wallets that had already been active. In 2025, 20 presale wallets moved for the first time in roughly a decade, sending about 52,755 ETH, led by a single 40,000-ETH transfer. In 2026 to date, another ten wallets have moved for the first time, sending about 15,164 ETH, including one 10,000-ETH address. Combined, that’s 30 wallets and approximately 67,900 ETH — about $131 million — released back into circulation after years of silence. Of those 30, 22 were emptied almost completely rather than partially drawn down, while eight moved only a portion of their balance and continue to hold ETH.
KeychainX said it directly recovered access to several 2014 presale wallets during this period, in cases where the original wallet file survived but the stored password no longer decrypted it. “Every time one of these wallets moves, it is a reminder that a large share of this ETH is not gone — it is stuck,” said Peter M., Chief Financial Officer at KeychainX. “In most of the cases we see, the owner is convinced the password is correct and cannot understand why it fails. It usually comes down to how a 2014 browser encoded a single non-standard character.”
For traders tracking supply overhang, the takeaway is twofold: a $2.7 billion pool of presale ETH remains structurally illiquid, but the pace of first-time movements in 2025–2026 shows that dormant coins aren’t permanently lost — they’re periodically re-entering circulation as recovery techniques catch up with a decade of forgotten encoding formats and lost credentials.
Read more: Dormant ETH Whale Wakes After 11 Months, Routes 9,000 ETH to Cumberland OTC Desk