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.
