British IT professional James Howells has officially ended his 12-year quest to recover 8,000 Bitcoin, currently valued at approximately $923 million, and has instead launched Ceiniog, a new Bitcoin layer-2 network.
The effort to retrieve the Bitcoin began when a hard drive containing the private keys was accidentally thrown away during an office cleanup in Newport and ended up in a local landfill. Despite repeated appeals and offers including one exceeding £25 million, Newport City Council consistently denied excavation requests, citing potential environmental hazards and permitting complexities.
Ceiniog, named after a medieval Welsh currency, represents an unconventional approach to leveraging the lost Bitcoin value. The project plans to hold an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), creating tokens representing 21% of the theoretical value of the inaccessible 8,000 BTC—approximately $194 million.
Importantly, these tokens do not constitute ownership or provide access to the buried Bitcoin itself. Instead, they aim to create a tradable digital asset in a Web3 environment, symbolically ‘backed’ by the value of the stranded coins. Howells has positioned Ceiniog as a community-driven initiative.
The project intends to allocate a portion of the tokens to fund development and build the Ceiniog network on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. This approach seeks to unlock utility from the otherwise unrecoverable Bitcoin hoard, despite the physical assets remaining irretrievably lost.