Kraken Co-Founder Loses Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Bitcoin
Date: 2025-09-19 Author: Oliver Abernathy Categories: BUSINESS
Kraken exchange co-founder Arjun Sethi made a surprising confession: at the very beginning of the Bitcoin era, he accidentally lost a fortune now estimated at $300-400 million.
In an interview, Sethi revealed that in 2009, he received a laptop from a former developer colleague. The device contained coins mined at a time when cryptocurrency's value was hardly a concern. "I just threw it away. If you recalculate those bitcoins at today's exchange rate, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars," he said.
At that time, Bitcoin didn't yet have a stable price; full-fledged trading only began in 2010. It was then that one of the most famous episodes in cryptocurrency history occurred: programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Today, that sum is equivalent to approximately $1.17 billion. Based on this, it can be assumed that Sethi got rid of at least 2,564 BTC.
Arjun's story is reminiscent of the case of British citizen James Howells, who lost a hard drive containing 7,500 BTC. Such stories are not uncommon: according to analysts, the owners of approximately 1.75 million Bitcoin wallets have been inactive for over a decade. Many of these accounts likely belong to people who have lost access to their funds.
Sethi emphasized that despite such tragic episodes, the crypto market develops cyclically and inevitably encounters bubbles. "If we look at a 15-year horizon, I'm confident there won't be a global bubble. But in the short term, the market is prone to localized overheating," he explained.
Such admissions once again illustrate how quickly perceptions of digital assets are changing. What initially seemed like a futile experiment has, over time, evolved into a tool capable of generating multimillion-dollar profits—or equally significant losses.
