The darkmarket.eth address returned 39,712 ETH (~$74 million at the time of writing) that had been locked during the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain-name auction.
It переместил these funds and a further 63,734 ETH (~$119 million) to a new wallet.
In 2021, ENS founder and chief developer Nick Johnson reminded darkmarket.eth and other users to return their assets locked in the protocol. He attached a special withdrawal link to the message.
“Essentially, they participated in the auctions and won several names back in 2016/2017, and when we migrated to the new version in 2019, they never published the documents authorising the return of the blocked funds,” Johnson wrote.
With the transition to the new ENS protocol, users were required to update their addresses for data and asset transfers. The developer noted that the old registry still contains “thousands of unclaimed domains containing tens of thousands of ETH.”
In August 2022, an unknown participant in the Ethereum ICO moved 145,000 ETH from a wallet that had been idle for the last three years.
Later, a user who bought 8,000 ETH during the ICO transferred all funds to another wallet. A few days earlier, 207 ETH were sent to the same address, which had been inactive since 2017.
In July 2023, the Ethereum Genesis participant address for the first time in eight years moved 641 ETH for about $1.2 million.