A May 2025 post on X made a specific claim. According to @_slimelife on X, roughly 1.5 billion ADA was sold “for him” at prices between $1 and $3 during the 2021 bull run, and Gavin Wood was owed 20 million ADA per month for ten months. Rather than treat the post as settled fact, on-chain analyst
Masato Alexander decided to test it against the Cardano ledger. That decision produced something the original post never attempted: a hop-by-hop trace, published at adagenesistransparency.com, mapping every transaction between the payment addresses and their genesis source.
The chain does not confirm a sale. It does not name a wallet owner. What it does show is a transaction pattern that fits the claimed size, cadence and period — almost exactly.
Nine Payments. One Address. 28-Day Cadence.
The first thing Alexander checked was the monthly payment claim. On Cardano’s ledger, he found nine payments of approximately 20.2 million ADA each, spaced about 28 days apart from April 2 to November 22, 2021. All nine landed at a single address — one that does not appear in transactions from any other year. The total: roughly 184.6 million ADA.
As Masato Alexander posted on X:
“The chain shows 9 payments of ~20.2M ADA, one a month, from Apr 2 to Nov 22, 2021, all to a single address that appears in no other year.”
The receiving address —
— kept nothing. Every incoming transfer forwarded to a single consolidation address, which itself shows external inflows of about 1.21 billion ADA from 37 depositors.
The hop trace from IOG’s genesis to the payment transaction. Alexander followed the dominant input at each step, walking backward through roughly 40 hops before every chain independently resolved to a single Byron genesis output: 2,463,071,701 ADA, matching IOG’s published genesis allocation to the lovelace.
The Genesis Trail Goes Through Pool Pledges
Here is where the new trace differs from earlier coverage. Most reporting noted the 40-hop path back to IOG’s genesis UTXO as the key finding. But Alexander went further.
As Masato Alexander posted on X: “Both the 925m AND the x9 20m payments have a closer common ancestor than IOG’s genesis ADA, which cuts the number of intermediary hops between IOG and these transactions from ~40 to ~1 to 7.”
That closer ancestor is IOG’s own stake pool pledge infrastructure. IOG operated a number of pools, each of which required an owner and a pledge of ADA as collateral. The trace gathers up roughly 21 of those 64 million ADA pledges from IOG’s private pools as a common upstream source for both payment streams.
The IOG 2.46B genesis wallet splitting into public pool, private pool, and pledge paths. The pledge layer sits between the genesis UTXO and both payment flows, dramatically shortening the provable distance.
The interactive flow graph is available at adagenesistransparency.com/graph. The full hop-by-hop trace and every raw transaction identifier, all deep-linked to Cardanoscan, is at adagenesistransparency.com.
925 Million ADA. Six Weeks. The Same Destination.
Separate from the monthly stream, Alexander found a second flow. Between February and March 2021, 33 payments ranging from 10 million to 50 million ADA moved in a burst totaling roughly 925 million ADA. These also trace, via dominant-input analysis, back to IOG’s genesis allocation.
The 925M ADA burst stream, showing 33 deposits converging through a burst sender to the same consolidation address that received the monthly payments.
Both the burst and the monthly stream feed into the same consolidation address — the one showing 1.21 billion ADA in combined external inflows from 37 depositors. The burst was distributed from this address:
The Timeline Line Up
The on-chain activity did not happen in isolation. The 925 million ADA burst began the same week what the Cardano community called the “birds” rumors started circulating. As Masato Alexander posted on X: “The burst began the same week the ‘birds’ rumors started, and the monthly payments ran through 2021.”
The published timeline at adagenesistransparency.com/report/timeline maps transaction dates against public statements. On February 6, 2021, Charles Hoskinson posted on X: “Damn birds. Always talking.” The first burst transaction landed on February 2, 2021. The monthly payments began April 2 and ran through November 22. Alexander’s site places these side by side without editorial commentary.
Hoskinson has not issued any public statement addressing this analysis. He did not respond to a request for comment from The Defiant. The Cardano Foundation told The Defiant in an emailed response that it had no insights into the transactions referenced in the thread.
What the Chain Cannot Do
Alexander is careful about the limits of what the trace proves. As he posted on X: “On-chain, the pattern fits the tweet’s claim on size, cadence, period and source: about 20M ADA a month, across 2021, from IOG’s genesis. What the chain cannot show is whether any of it was sold. That is off-chain. All we can see are transfers, not sales.”
Dominant-input tracing is an indicator of origin, not proof of intent. Cardano addresses are pseudonymous. The chain ties no wallet to any named person through a signed message, exchange record, legal filing or official disclosure.
The full funding trail from epoch 2017 to 2021, showing the pledge layer, burst stream and monthly payments converging at the consolidation desk address.
There is also a naming question. The original tweet referenced Gavin Wood, the Ethereum and Polkadot co-founder. As Alexander posted on X, he thinks there is a real chance the original post mistook IOG’s co-founder Jeremy Wood for Gavin Wood, given the shared surname. Nothing in the on-chain data distinguishes which person, if any, was the intended recipient.
Where ADA Sits Now
ADA was trading at $0.1623 on June 11, per CoinGecko data, down roughly 22% over seven days and 42% over the prior 30 days. The token has fallen 94.74% from its September 2021 all-time high of $3.09 — the price band in which the original tweet claims the alleged sales occurred.
The analysis arrives against a governance crisis that has been unsettling the Cardano ecosystem since early June 2025, following a string of ecosystem shutdowns and Hoskinson public statements he later partially walked back. That context gives the on-chain findings a wider audience than they might have attracted otherwise.
The complete combined transaction graph from adagenesistransparency.com showing IOG genesis, public and private pool ladders, the IOG reward wallet, the burst stream, and the monthly payment path in a single view.
The full report, interactive graph and every transaction identifier is at adagenesistransparency.com. Alexander has said that if any errors are found in the data or methodology, he will update the report on request.
