LHV Bank Founder Lost Access to 250,000 ETH
The founder of LHV Bank, Rain Lõhmus, is in the spotlight of the crypto community. It was revealed that he owns a cryptocurrency wallet with assets worth $470 million. Ironically, he is unable to access these funds due to the loss of the private key.
In February 2023, Conor Grogan, Head of Business Operations at Coinbase, stumbled upon an address containing 250,000 units of Ethereum (ETH). In an updated post on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) on November 6, he confirmed that the wallet belongs to Lõhmus:
Earlier, the founder of LHV Bank had mentioned his inability to access the funds during an episode of the Vikerraadio show. Lõhmus acquired this cryptocurrency during the initial coin offering (ICO) of the Ethereum project in 2014, when the price of 1 ETH was around $0.3. By November 10, 2021, the price of 1 ETH had risen to $4878, according to CoinGecko data. If Lõhmus had decided to sell the 250,000 ETH, he could have earned approximately $1.22 billion.
This incident is not unique in the world of cryptocurrencies. In October 2023, prominent investor and analyst PlanB lost his wallet containing Bitcoin (BTC), and former CTO of Ripple, Stefan Thomas, forgot the password to his IronKey hard drive, which held 7002 BTC. These cases highlight the importance of security and responsible storage of cryptocurrency assets. Read our article about hardware wallets and cold storage to learn more information about how to keep your crypto safe.
