Fears of $1.3 Billion ETH Selloff from PlusToken Scam

On the evening of October 9, 2024 (UTC), the cryptocurrency community was once again put on high alert when analysis from the X (Twitter) account @ErgoBTC revealed that a small portion of Ethereum (ETH) worth around $17 million, belonging to a $1.3 billion ETH stash tied to the Chinese Ponzi scheme PlusToken, had been moved to exchanges.

https://x.com/ErgoBTC/status/1844117289123410303

PlusToken, one of the largest crypto scams in history, quickly rose to prominence during 2018-2019 before being dismantled by Chinese authorities. The massive assets seized included 194,775 BTC ($11.2 billion), 833,083 ETH and millions of other cryptocurrencies such as LTC, EOS, DASH, XRP, DOGE, BCH and USDT.

According to ErgoBTC, while all of PlusToken’s Bitcoin holdings were liquidated by China during 2019-2020, only a third of the Ethereum holdings were sold on the Bidesk exchange. The remaining 542,000 ETH had been dormant for four years, only showing signs of movement in early August. This remaining stash is now valued at $1.3 billion.

As of October 9, around 15,700 ETH ($38.4 million) had been transferred from this group of addresses, with 7,000 ETH ($17.1 million) sent to major exchanges such as Binance, OKX and Bitget. This prompted ErgoBTC to speculate that the liquidation of PlusToken’s ETH could soon restart, creating enormous selling pressure on Ethereum.

In response to this news, ETH saw a slight decline of about 1.7% on the morning of October 10 and is currently trading around $2,395.