LHV Bank Founder Loses $1 Billion in Ethereum

Earlier we told the sad story of British miner James Howells. In 2009, he mined more than 7,5 thousand bitcoins, but in 2013, he accidentally threw away the hard drive with a private key. The value of these assets today exceeds $900 million.

Howells’s years-long efforts to obtain permission to excavate a Newport landfill where he believes the hard drive is buried failed in 2024 — the court finally banned the search. Recently, after the appeal was rejected and security was installed at the site, Howells announced that he was ending the fight.

And now the community has been shaken by a new story of a lost private key, which has led to huge financial losses. One of the founders of LHV Bank, Rein Lohmus, cannot use his fortune in Ethereum, which is estimated at $ 1,16 billion. In 2015, he invested in ICO project $75 thousand, buying coins for 30 cents. However, over time, the key to the wallet was lost.

Lokhmus explained this by the fact that in the mid-2010s, the industry had not yet developed reliable storage practices and hardware wallets were not widespread.

Both stories are an important reminder of the cryptocurrency industry’s cardinal rule: «not your keys, not your coins.» A lesson that some learned too hard, with billions of dollars’ worth of tokens lost.

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