The secret ATM of the Ethereum founding team! The secrets behind cashing out $10 billion over eight years!
When Jeffrey Wilcke transferred the last 100,000 ETH to the exchange, this nine-year-long precision cash-out finally reached its conclusion — a total of 394,000 ETH sold for $510 million, with only 265 ETH left in the account. This creator of the Ethereum Geth client humorously annotated the black humor of crypto faith with the remaining balance after the decimal point.
The Ethereum Foundation's "art of timing the market" is a textbook-level operation: Selling 70,000 ETH at the peak of the 2017 bull market to avoid a 35,000 ETH sell-off at 853,500, and then selling another 20,000 at $4700 in November, successfully avoiding a 75% crash the following year. On-chain data shows that in the past three years, their 32 small sell-offs hit local peaks 15 times, with a success rate of 47%.
Vitalik's capital maneuvering is even more dramatic: The initially held 500,000 ETH mysteriously disappeared, with 840,000 ETH through exchange transfers and "charitable donations." The SHIB tokens donated to India in 2021 were actually a secondary operation after cashing out ETH, leading followers to fall into a plunge under the halo of morality. His wallet operations have become a market barometer; after transferring to Kraken, the volatility will surely exceed 40% within 14 days.
The founding team is embedding a new harvesting mechanism into the protocol layer: Gavin Wood staked 140,000 ETH through Lido for an annualized profit of $8 million, while the Decun upgrade will convert staked ETH into liquidity tools. Regulators are closely watching the securitization lawsuit but ignore that every swap from the 0xd7d7 foundation address is a signal of long-short reversal.
This group of geeks who once created a decentralized belief has now become the most centralized traders. When Wilcke's GitHub repository is marked as "abandoned" and when Vitalik deletes the Twitter label "ETH Founder," the truth becomes increasingly clear: Ethereum's most successful smart contract is, in fact, a self-destruct program of the founding team. At this moment, their claim of "long-term optimism" often means that the OTC channel is ready — this is the last escape window and the entry contract for new investors.
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