16 April 2024
Arkham Intelligence, an industry leader in on-chain data tracking, has released a list of the richest people in crypto according to their wallet balances. This list has been making the rounds in the crypto community due to the top 5 alone being worth billions of dollars. But perhaps, what is more interesting is how much of this money has now been deemed inaccessible.
3 Of The Top 5 Crypto Rich List Lost Forever
Arkham took to X (formerly Twitter) to share the top 10 richest individuals in crypto ranked by the net worth of their wallet holdings. But the most interesting bits actually lay in the list of the top 5 richest individuals, which included the likes of Tron’s Justin Sun and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin.
According to the data shared by Arkham, Justin Sun emerged at the top of the list with a wallet balance of $1.1 billion, followed by Rain Lohmus, the Chairman of LHV Bank, whose wallet is worth $793 million. Next in line is Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, with a wallet balance of $782 million.
In fourth place is Stefan Thomas, a software engineer whose wallet holds a considerable $452 million. And then last but not least is James Fickel, with a total wallet net worth of $446 million. Altogether, these crypto millionaires and billionaire, hold a total of $3.5 billion. However, not all of this money is available to the owners.
As Arkham notes in its report, two out of these five individuals are no longer able to access their wallets anymore. The first of these two is Rain Lohmus who had invested $75,000 during the Ethereum ICO. Lohmus’s allocation came out to 250,000 ETH, which has appreciated greatly over time. However, he can no longer access the coins.
According to Lohmus, he had lost access to his Ethereum wallet and was unable to find the key to the wallet. Given this, the coins are presumed to be lost forever, but Lohmus has offered a 50-50 split to anyone who can access the wallet and recover the funds.
Another individual whose coins are deemed lost is Stefan Thomas. Thomas is infamous in the crypto space for throwing out a flash drive that held the private keys to a wallet containing over 7,000 BTC over 10 years ago. Since then, Thomas has led efforts to excavate the landfill where he believes his trash was sent to, in an effort to recover the flash drive and recover the coins. However, he has run into various issues, such as the city not allowing him to excavate the dump site.
The other three on the list still have access to their wallets and are still involved in the crypto space to varying degrees.