Case Studies

An estimated 1.8 million BTC sit in wallets that have shown no activity since the early days of Bitcoin, likely belonging to miners and early adopters who lost their keys.

Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator mined approximately 1.1 million BTC in the earliest days of the network. None of it has ever been moved.

Mt. Gox, once handling 70% of all Bitcoin transactions, collapsed in 2014 after 850,000 BTC were stolen in one of the largest hacks in history.

An unidentified hacker stole 69,370 BTC from the Silk Road marketplace. The FBI seized the coins in 2020 in one of the largest cryptocurrency seizures in history.

QuadrigaCX CEO Gerald Cotten died in India, taking the sole access to $190M in customer crypto to his grave.

On 22 May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world Bitcoin transaction: 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas.

A Welsh IT worker accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin, then spent over a decade fighting Newport City Council for permission to excavate a landfill.

A programmer received 7,002 BTC for creating a Bitcoin explainer video, then lost access when he forgot the password to his encrypted IronKey USB drive.

Irish drug dealer Clifton Collins hid 6,000 BTC private keys in a fishing rod case. After his arrest, the keys were lost when the case was sent to a Chinese landfill.

Banking heir Matthew Mellon amassed a crypto fortune worth over $1 billion in XRP, but his heirs struggled to access it after his sudden death.