Data Shows 40M People Hold 0.0005 Dust ETH, Making $11M Lost Token

• Over 40M ETH wallets hold less than 0.0005 ETH.
• By implication, 6242 ETH worth $11M million Ethereum is out of circulation.
• Over $1.15B ETH are lost forever to typos, user errors, and buggy contracts.

Conor Grogan, a director at the Coinbase crypto exchange, recently discussed some intriguing statistics about Ethereum wallets and the amount of ETH tokens held in them.

Grogan quoted data from an analytic firm highlighting that over 40 million Ethereum wallets hold less than 0.0005 ETH, approximately $0.90. By implication, there is roughly $11 million worth of Ethereum, equivalent to 6242 ETH, out of circulation, as the amount is too small to be worth trading or exchanging.

Furthermore, around 80 million wallets hold less than $18 worth of ETH, representing 35% of all cumulative unique addresses on the Ethereum network, according to the data the Coinbase director shared. Despite the small amounts in these wallets, they collectively translate to over $230 million, matching to 126k ETH tokens.

In another Twitter thread, the crypto researcher revealed instances where 636,000 ETH worth $1.15 billion were lost forever to typos, user errors, and buggy contracts, accounting for about 0.5% of the total ETH token circulating supply.

The most considerable losses in the Ethereum ecosystem include Web3 Foundation, which has 306K ETH, $538 million, trapped due to the Parity Multisig bug; Quadriga losing 60K ETH, $108 million, to a faulty contract. It also includes people who collectively sent $43 million to a burn address for unknown reasons.

Interestingly, the over $1.1 billion lost Ethereum captured above does not cover instances of lost private keys or forgotten Genesis wallets, according to the researcher. ETH trades at $1,801, an over 6% increase in the past week.