A claim has emerged that a bitcoin wallet holding 8,999 BTC, lost in 2010, could be recovered.

On May 2, blockchain media outlet BeinCrypto reported that a developer said an Nvidia CUDA-based tool could find the lost wallet key of the so-called “Stone Man”.

The wallet has shown no movement for about 16 years. It is worth about $688 million at current value. Based on the bitcoin price of $78,180 cited in the report, it is worth close to $703 million. If recovery succeeds, it could be one of the biggest cases of bitcoin ever retrieved.

The circumstances of the loss are linked to the structure of early bitcoin wallets. Stone Man bought 9,000 BTC in 2010 and ran bitcoin client version 0.3.2 from a Linux boot CD. After sending 1 BTC to his own address, the software automatically generated a “change address” for the remaining 8,999 BTC. The problem was that when the system shut down, the boot CD deleted the updated wallet.dat file. The existing backup did not include the newly created change address, leaving the funds locked to an unrecorded key.

A Reddit user (@CompetitiveRough8180), who raised the possibility of recovery, said the new tool narrows the search range by using the weak entropy of early bitcoin client keys. The user said the computation is handed off through CUDA to GPU hardware, making it possible again to attempt what was previously abandoned using only CPUs.

Interest in the case is growing because it may not be limited to a single wallet. Bitcoin locked in lost wallets is estimated at about 4,000,000 BTC. Many were created in the network’s early days, when entropy management and backup practices were weaker than they are now. If the developer’s claimed structural weakness in early clients is verified, it could also affect long-dormant wallets from the same period, the report said.

The issue is also refocusing market attention, not on price, but on early bitcoin wallet security structures and the possibility of recovering lost assets. If vulnerabilities in early key generation methods are proven, moves could follow to reassess the status of large bitcoin holdings that have not moved for a long time, the outlet reported.