Conor Grogan, the Coinbase executive, has helped a crypto investor suddenly become richer as he recovers lost crypto worth $322K that the investor lost in a hack in 2019.
In a Twitter thread on Thursday, July 6, the head of product at Coinbase, Conor Grogan, shared how he found $322K of a crypto investor who lost his life savings in 2019 and was able to connect with him to make his day.
I found $322k for a stranger who previously lost their life savings in a hack pic.twitter.com/K1gUqEkAPh
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) July 5, 2023
According to Conor Grogan, Ethereum was forked in 2016, giving birth to Ethereum Classic (ETC). Any investor who held the standard Ether (ETH) on-chain was airdropped an identical amount of ETC. He theorizes that many investors were not aware that they were in the snapshot. They never touched these funds. Furthermore, prices were low then, so many not paid attention to their funds.
Forgetting Early Crypto Investments is Common, says Conor Grogan
Forgetting early crypto investment is common, as prices were very low back then. As of 2023, many early crypto investors have found their once-forgotten wealth. Conor said that he had found many six-figure people previously. In February 2023, he notified a Twitter user of 23 ETH that had been sitting untouched.
In this case, Conor Grogan said he “went through the ETC rich list, looking for accounts that never touched their ETC balances.” He found about 20 ETC addresses holding more than $250K without any activity. He combed through each address to track the owner but hit many dead ends. He wrote:
“Tagging isn’t great for 2016-era Ethereum and most of the activity that doxes people (ENS’s, NFTs, Twitter) wasn’t around yet. I ran into a number of dead ends; most users ended up sending their full balances to exchanges leading no paper trail to find out who owned them.”
Conor then stumbled upon an address with the prefix “0x475.” The address contained a unique “EOSDAC” coin that he never heard of. It turned out that the coin was airdropped to Ethereum holders in 2018. Looking through the airdropped amount and snapshot date led him to an EOS wallet that had quite a history.
He found that the owner of the address “had their life savings stolen by a hacker in 2019 and was in a legal battle with their cybersecurity provider as well as with Bitfinex.” The legal documents enabled the executive to track down the owner.
Conor finally managed to get in touch with the owner and inform them of their long-lost riches. He then shared the screenshot of his chat with the owner, who said he was unaware of these funds.
Update: they wernt aware of these funds! pic.twitter.com/qej8WGzYLA
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) July 5, 2023
Conor Grogan also mentioned TRON founder Justin Sun to tell him that he had “found a number of Poloniex wallets that have significant untouched ETC balances.”
