A wallet tied to Ethereum's 2015 initial coin offering spent $23.7 million in stablecoins on 8,492.8 ETH on Sept. 21, paying roughly $2,794 per coin — almost 39% more than the $2,010 it received when it sold in March, according to Cryptopolitan's calculation.

The purchase was routed through Cow Swap, a decentralized exchange aggregator that pools orders into batch auctions and can match traders directly with one another. The address, 0xBE42…0c5F, converted four stablecoins at once.

On-chain analyst ai_9684xtpa, who first flagged the trade on X, put the total spend at $23.72 million, with a cost basis of $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 left the wallet between 15:29 and 15:37 UTC on Sept. 21, according to the CoW Protocol explorer order history, a public log where any future orders from the address would appear.

Aave debt cleared in the same session

In the same session, the wallet cleared about 809 wrapped ether of debt on DeFi lender Aave — a lending protocol where users deposit assets such as ether as collateral and borrow against them — and pulled roughly 8,876 ETH of collateral back out. With the new purchase, it now holds around 16,773 ETH.

Two rows down in that same order history, dated March 27, the address sold 1,923.05 Aave-wrapped ether for 3,866,637.83 USDC — about $2,010.68 per coin, on a day ETH finished at $1,992.

The whale exited near $2,010 and re-entered near $2,794. With ETH at $2,749 at 12:38 UTC on Sept. 22, new stack is down roughly $382,000. ETH traded as high as $2,807 within hours of the buy, its first print above $2,800 since Jan. 30, 2026.

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

The address is connected to Ethereum's original sale. It subscribed 38,800 ETH at about $0.31 per coin, tokens that landed when the network went live in 2015, according to ai_9684xtpa. The crowdsale itself ran in 2014 and raised roughly $18 million in bitcoin.

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

Other large holders were also active in 2026

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 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 — about $55.8 million — over five days starting Sept. 18. It paid between $2,450 and $2,762, an average of $2,593, and is up about $3.25 million on paper. That cluster sold UBTC, a wrapped bitcoin from Hyperliquid, to fund the ETH, a pattern similar to a previous Hyperliquid whale who traded 1,107 BTC for 34,422 ETH, though 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.