Crypto user reclaims $74 million of ether from old Ethereum Name Service contract
Quick Take
- A wallet with 39,700 ether held in Ethereum Name Service’s old registrar claimed the funds after roughly four years.
- The wallet also moved 63,700 ether to a new wallet.
A crypto user and Ethereum Name Service holder reclaimed $74 million of ether from the old ENS registrar that was replaced roughly four years ago.
Today, the wallet — which hadn't made a transaction since November 2021 — suddenly awoke and reclaimed 39,700 ether across multiple transactions, per Lookonchain. Then it sent just shy of 63,700 ether — funds already in the wallet — to a new wallet.
"Basically, they bid on (and won) a bunch of names back in ~2016/2017, and when we switched to the new system in 2019, they never released the deeds to claim their locked funds back," ENS lead developer Nick Johnson told The Block.
ENS provides human readable names, like example.eth, that are linked to blockchain addresses — making it easier to send transactions. When the platform was upgraded in 2019 from its interim registrar to a more permanent one, it required each ENS holder to migrate over.
Yet, many users have still not done so — and they still have a lot of ether locked up in the old registrar. ENS Lead Developer Nick Johnson tweeted that there are still hundreds of thousands of deeds unclaimed in the old registrar holding tens of thousands of ether.
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