On-chain encryption billionaire list revealed: billions of dollars in assets are inaccessible due to lost Private Keys.

The analysis company Arkham recently released a list of the top ten wealthy individuals in the crypto assets field, showing that this wealth can be tracked on-chain. Unsurprisingly, at the top is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin worth over 100 billion dollars. The list also includes TRON founder Justin Sun and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

It is worth noting that there are four billionaires on the list who control tens of billions of dollars in crypto assets but are unable to access them. Arkham points out that Rain Lõhmus, James Howells, Stefan Thomas, and Clifton Collins collectively hold about $2.7 billion in Bitcoin and Ether, which are visible on-chain but have become inaccessible for various reasons.

Human error caused a large amount of assets to be frozen.

1. Rain Lõhmus ($762 million) Estonian entrepreneur Lõhmus invested in the Ethereum initial coin offering in 2014, acquiring about 250,000 ETH, which is now worth $762 million. However, he has lost access to the wallet and has been unable to use this asset for years. He even offered a reward of 50% of the funds in the wallet in hopes of recovering it.
2. James Howells ($731 million) Wales IT practitioner Howells threw a hard drive containing Bitcoin private keys into a landfill in 2013, resulting in 8,000 Bitcoins being unrecoverable, worth approximately $731 million. He made multiple attempts to retrieve the hard drive through legal means or by purchasing the landfill, but was unsuccessful.
3. Stefan Thomas ($639 million) Bitcoin early contributor Thomas early acquired about 7002 Bitcoins, but he lost access due to the password attempt limit on his IronKey hardware wallet. Currently, these Bitcoins are worth about 639 million dollars, but cannot be accessed.
4. Clifton Collins ($546 million) Irishman Collins used illegal proceeds to purchase Bitcoin, depositing it into multiple wallets, with the private keys written inside the aluminum caps of fishing rods. Due to a burglary and the landlord's cleanup, the whereabouts of these private keys are unknown, and the Bitcoin worth approximately $546 million has been frozen.

Warning Brought by Decentralization

Analysts point out that the self-custody design of Bitcoin and other crypto assets, while ensuring the security and auditability of assets, also increases the risk of permanent loss of assets due to human error. Analyst Illia Otychenko describes this state as “wealth in a quantum state: visible but unattainable.”

Hacken forensic expert Rudytsia suggests that by using account abstraction smart contract wallets equipped with a “guardian” system, the risk of losing recoverable assets can be reduced while ensuring security.

Multiple analyses estimate that approximately 2.3 million to 4 million Bitcoins (accounting for 11% to 20% of the total supply) are permanently lost due to reasons such as lost private keys, hard drive damage, or death, with a value of about 210 billion to 366 billion dollars. This highlights the advantages and potential risks of self-custody in decentralized financial systems. (Cryptonews)