But you are right, since there is no account holding 2 billion Espers, this means the coins were spent.
Anyway. At some point in time, when the coins were premined for the swap, 1 address was holding the entire amount for the swap, where the 2 Billion coins unswapped were left over. That is the address I want to see. That's the question.
Luckily this is a public blockchain so everything is publicly verifiable in the block explorer. You are probably looking for this transaction:
https://explorer.espers.io/tx/7400ae5f900251e10478e7a85878acf6b71272c5722abaa2d5e0d0b920bbca1bApparently the coins were not premined to a single address, but were pre-mined to many different addresses holding 50M coins each, starting with
block 11 on the new chain.
In the above transaction, 2 billion coins were moved from those pre-mine addresses to the address
EHCnQ4CEpbayNng7eW74J9NKqan5Wivbkx on 9/11, 2016.
With respect to the previous discussion, the only thing I can say is that Espers has never been marketed as an investment vehicle and has always been clear about the fact that it's mainly an experimental blockchain technology project by Cryptocoderz. Trading and speculation with crypto tokens is a natural part of the game like you said, but it has never been the purpose of the project and nobody of the team ever asked anyone to purchase coins on crypto exchanges. Everybody who still does so knows about the risks and is doing so strictly on his/her own responsibility.
So if you are complaining about the lack of progress, lagging behind the roadmap and calling the project a "scam", you seem to assume that Cryptocoderz or other people who have contributed to Espers owe the investors anything, which is not the case, because by definition, any announcements made are not promises and prospects made for investors, but simply a declaration of intent for the sake of transparency. Again, it's not a commercial project and sometimes there can be delays or other things getting in the way. Everybody in the Espers community knows this and is ok with it.
Now, even IF Cryptocoderz at some point made some money with this (which he didn't, like he said, but of course we can never know for sure), then I'm only happy for him because he's a fine guy who always cares more about other people's issues than about his own and clearly deserves some compensation for that. If you have been following the project you will know that he clearly doesn't swim in money so there is no reason for envy or any other kind of animosities here.