Currently, the hot discussion on X is about what happened with the unclaimed ADA from the ICO, started, I think, by this post:
So, a little bit of history: Cardano was originally funded by selling vouchers in Japan (and to a far lesser extent some other Asian countries). https://cardano.org/genesis/
These vouchers could (as far as I know, I was not around at that time) originally be redeemed by every owner themselves in Daedalus. But that redemption mechanism couldn’t work anymore after the Shelley hard fork:
https://github.com/intersectmbo/cardano-ledger/releases/latest/download/shelley-ledger.pdf
So, with the Allegra hard fork (2020-12-16), the ADA for all vouchers not redeemed up to that point were moved into the reserve: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-ledger/pull/1933
Later, on 2021-10-23, those ADA – 318.199 980 million – were removed from the reserve and given to six stake addresses by the “instantaneous rewards” mechanism – a transaction signed by enough Genesis keys that can move from treasury or reserve to stake keys (also in the past, before the Chang hard fork, used to withdraw ADA from the treasury to Catalyst): 03b02cff29a5f2dfc827e00345eaab8b29a3d740e9878aa6e5dd2b52da0763c5 (look at the “Rewards” tab)
EDIT: In fact, there had also been a (test?) withdrawal an epoch earlier, putting 100 ADA to each of those stakes: 3d24e82502b671f2423cc862d4e3199164ceba8cd4711c680ca4a6b408d3ff60 This raises the total escrow volume to 318.200 580 million ADA.
If you have ever seen this strange bump in graphs of the history of the Cardano reserve – e.g., in https://x.com/C1cADA_Markus/status/1636023374609625090 – this is it. First, unclaimed ADA going into the reserve end of 2020, then being withdrawn again end of 2021:
The metadata of that transaction says: “Moved from reserves to ada pre-sale redemption escrow” And for some years, a manual redemption process was operated:
https://iohk.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/900003850926-Ada-Redemption
Now, the https://adaredemption.com/ website says:
According to Google Translate this means:
Who exactly operates or has operated this service – IOG? Emurgo? CF? – is a bit intransparent. The website has no imprint. The server is somewhere on Amazon AWS. I always assumed, it was IOG.
In any case, they had to have access to those six “escrow” stakes to redeem the vouchers:
- stake1uy86sf5xrzcpg2ncddkzz6z2ca2m59qsnu4qxar08g9rvkgwkpjjv
Delegated to ARF3 since Epoch 298: stake key still registered, but pool retired, had been a private pool with 100% margin and this stake as owner all the time.
Initial reserve withdrawal: 66 000 100 ADA
Total rewards over time: 6 002 476.073 187 ADA
Current balance: 2.888 847 ADA - stake1uykws5pmwjxktdhlkz0pac3cu2guw6fjys2zaanmdew6xrs5lgv4n
Delegated to ARF1 since Epoch 298: had been a private pool with 100% margin until Epoch 382, since Epoch 383 normal pool attracting external delegation, this stake owner all the time.
Initial reserve withdrawal: 66 000 100 ADA
Total rewards over time: 4 468 195.480 106 ADA
Current balance: 5 758 682.225 152 ADA - stake1u9mymn640v59n3mwyfdsg5t6yu34ut9ufvynavsn0ey40ugqdj6lh
Delegated to private pool without any blocks for Epochs 298 and 299
Delegated to SKY3 since Epoch 300: has been a public pool attracting external delegation all the time, this stake owner until Epoch 516, other owner since Epoch 517.
Initial reserve withdrawal: 27 100 090 ADA
Total rewards over time: 1 420 887.445 413 ADA
Current balance: 6 070 805.657 989 ADA - stake1u887jrylddch0vh4d2kx72h2ax8t7aeq49zvmry4g9wcj4g3gty8j
Delegated to private pool without any blocks for Epochs 298 and 299
Delegated to SKY4 since Epoch 300: has been a public pool attracting external delegation all the time, this stake owner until Epoch 516, other owner since Epoch 517.
Initial reserve withdrawal: 27 100 090 ADA
Total rewards over time: 1 542 050.759 336 ADA
Current balance: 6 098 550.277 136 ADA - stake1u80y77jjfcdymt38amg3na9w4p4d89ffw66xqsspdwsa2sqt8epdn
Delegate to ARF2 since Epoch 298: has been a private pool with 100% margin all the time, this stake owner until Epoch 416, other owners since Epoch 417, no rewards since then.
Initial reserve withdrawal: 66 000 100 ADA
Total rewards over time: 5 345 011.536 093 ADA
Current balance: 2.888 847 ADA - stake1u8kgcfdpefrnf5570v47manyyg85jshlrg4p2hrsx3wdspccdda8v
Delegated to ARF4 since Epoch 298: stake key still registered, but pool retired, had been a private pool with 100% margin and this stake as owner all the time.
Initial reserve withdrawal: 66 000 100 ADA
Total rewards over time: 7 795 439.838 827 ADA
Current balance: 505.237 797 ADA (most of it the pool registration deposit waiting to be withdrawn)
There are roughly 17.9 million ADA still on these addresses (mainly in 2., 3., and 4.). They were (and the ones with relevant balance still are) delegated to several https://www.wavepool.digital/ pools. Two of them were briefly delegated to private pools in the beginning, but after a couple of days also redelegated. And they earned quite some rewards (roughly 26.6 million ADA) over the years.
EDIT: Improved layout a bit and added details about the history of the pool updates. Seems that they tried different strategies (private vs. public pool, these stakes as owner or other – presumably Wave – stakes as owner). ARF2 is especially confusing: “ARF” probably stands for “ADA Redemption Fund”, but it seems to have been repurposed to be used for something else with other owner stakes. Not a big deal since there are less than 3 ADA still in that stake, but confusing nevertheless.
So, what happened to those ADA? Did they manage to find enough of them to redeem more than 300 million of the 319 million ADA that were still unclaimed in 2021? And why do I have to do the blockchain detective and this was never really written up transparently, publicly, and openly by those who had done it?
There is the rumour going around that what was left was used to fund Intersect/DevTrust for the current year. Can we find indications for that? And would that be bad? After all, those were unclaimed ADA with no owner. But shouldn’t the wider Cardano community at least have been informed about this? Could at least make some question marks on: “The seed funder seats have a three-year term in consideration of funding given, […]” (https://docs.intersectmbo.org/intersect-overview/intersects-structure/intersect-governance)
So, I’ll have to dig into the transaction history of those six stakes. Could take a moment.
