Ethereum ICO whale spends $23.7 million on ETH it sold at $2,010 in March

On Sept. 21, a wallet from Ethereum’s 2015 ICO dumped $23.7 million worth of stablecoins into 8,492.8 ETH, paying about $2,794 a coin.

That’s almost 39% more than the $2,010 it fetched when it sold in March, by Cryptopolitan’s calculation.

Four Cow Swap orders cleared in eight minutes on Sept. 21

The purchase took place via Cow Swap, a decentralized exchange aggregator that pools orders. Address 0xBE42…0c5F dumped four stablecoins at once.

On-chain analyst ai_9684xtpa, who originally flagged the trade on X, pegged the total spend at $23.72 million with the cost basis at $2,793.59.

The four fills were: 10,049,997.50 DAI for 3,591.36 ETH, 4,493,614.20 USDS for 1,611.18 ETH, 7,055,997.28 USDC for 2,527.90 ETH and 2,125,834.46 USDT for 762.36 ETH.

The stablecoins departed the wallet between 15:29 and 15:37 UTC on Sept. 21, the CoW Protocol explorer order history shows.

In that same session, the wallet cleared about 809 wrapped ether of debt on DeFi lender Aave, and pulled ~8,876 ETH of collateral back out. With the new purchase, it now has about 16,773 ETH.

In the same order history, two rows down, dated March 27, the address sold 1,923.05 Aave-wrapped ether for 3,866,637.83 USDC. That works out to $2,010.68 a coin, with ETH finishing that day at $1,992.

The whale exited around $2,010 and reentered around $2,794. At $2,749 for ETH at 12:38 UTC on Sept. 22, the new stack is down around $382,000.

ETH traded as high as $2,807 within hours of the buy, the first print above $2,800 since Jan. 30, 2026.

A $12,028 founding stake hit about $108.6 million at the Sept. 21 high

The address is connected to Ethereum’s original sale. It was a subscription of 38,800 ETH at about $0.31 a coin, tokens that landed when the network went live in 2015, said ai_9684xtpa.

The original outlay was about $12,028. That same position would be worth around $108.6 million at the Sept. 21 high near $2,800.

In February, OG whales removed tens of thousands of ETH from OKX and Binance into self-custody while ETH traded close to $2,037.

Separate data showed that large holders had shed up to 1.5% of their reserves in early 2026 as the price fell below $2,000.

Another entity that dispersed purchases across new addresses picked up 21,520 ETH, equal to about $55.8 million, across five days starting Sept. 18. It paid between $2,450 and $2,762 for an average of $2,593 and is up about $3.25 million on paper.

That cluster sold UBTC, wrapped bitcoin from Hyperliquid, to fund the ETH. It’s similar to a previous Hyperliquid whale who traded 1,107 BTC for 34,422 ETH, although no one has confirmed the two are the same trader.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine added 27,562 ETH last week, and now holds close to 4.9% of ETH’s supply.

Spot ether ETFs took in $270 million on Monday, led by BlackRock’s ETHA at $110.1 million and Fidelity’s FETH at $73 million.

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