TLDR:

Market: Ethereum ($ETH), which does not have a contract address, surged to $4,700 and above, boosting Rain Lõhmus’s inaccessibility of 250,000 ETH to $1.18 billion on August 14, 2025, up from a 2014 presales buy of $75,000.
Narrative: Estonian banker Rain Lõhmus, whose own key to his Ethereum wallet had disappeared, watches as an initial deposit of $75,000 rises to $1.18 billion to surpass on-chain holdings of Vitalik Buterin.

Ethereum Rally Puts Forgotten Wallet At $1.18B, Owner Locked Out Since 2014 — *Rain Lõhmus Forgot His $1.18B Wallet’s Private Key*

Estonia’s LHV Bank founder Rain Lõhmus had found himself in a bittersweet crypto saga on August 14, 2025, as his out-of-reach Ethereum wallet, which contained 250,000 ETH bought at $75,000 during the 2014 presale, had attained a mind-boggling valuation of $1.18 billion. With $ETH equivalent to $4,750, Lõhmus’s wallet had trumped the $1.16 billion on-chain Ethereum holdings of Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. Lõhmus, however, had lost access to the private key to that fortune and had made the fortune intractable and effectively “burned” in Solana’s competitive crypto space.

Lõhmus’s dilemma, uncovered in a 2023 Estonian radio interview, shows the possible danger of self-custody in decentralized networks. The inactive wallet, inactive for nine years except for infinitesimally small “dust transfers” and small incoming transactions, remains inactive, having never once withdrawn ETH. Lõhmus has been receptive to making sensible recovery alternatives but acknowledged the loss, stating, “Self-custody of private keys is a fatal weakness. I reset my ID card password today—if this were crypto, I’d be in crisis.” His own previous loss of a modest Bitcoin stash once again demonstrates the individual security vulnerabilities in crypto, a lesson known to James Howells, who has dedicated well over a decade attempting to recover an 8,000 BTC (currently worth $720 million) hard drive tossed into a Newport garbage dump.

Ethereum’s price rally, nearly reaching its $4,891.70 all-time high, raises the stakes. Following institutional ETF inflows and a Solana X Layer 5,000 TPS competitor upgrade, $ETH’s $480 billion market cap and $41.47 billion of daily volume overwhelm DeFi.

Naul.T