An ancient Bitcoin whale that woke up for the first time in 14 years earlier this month is making headlines again with another multi-billion-dollar BTC transfer.
About 10 days ago, two Bitcoin addresses that each had 10,000 BTC were each emptied within minutes of each other on the 4th of July.
The two wallets had received their respective Bitcoin on April 3rd of 2011 when BTC was trading at $0.78 a piece.
Then, last week, Coinbase director Conor Grogan suggested that the whale wallets could potentially be linked to a hack after finding that one of the wallets appears to have made a test transaction on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network just hours before the big move happened, suggesting that whoever was responsible for the transfer was trying to go unnoticed.
Now, according to pseudonymous crypto analyst Satoshi Stacker, one of the two whales is at it again, moving almost $5 billion worth of BTC to new wallets.
“The 80,000 BTC whale has moved 40,000 BTC worth around $4.7 billion to new addresses.
Around $2 billion of that BTC has then been transferred to centralized exchanges, likely to be sold.
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While the wallets were dormant since April of 2011, they also received trace amounts of Bitcoin during the intervening period, possibly due to dusting attacks conducted to try to sniff out the entities behind the addresses. Dusting attacks are typically conducted by researchers, law enforcement officials or criminals.
The phenomenon of long-dormant addresses suddenly getting active spurs media interest due to their potential link to the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, who remains a mystery more than one and a half decades since the crypto king was introduced to the world.
Bitcoin is trading for $117,195 at time of writing, a 2.2% decrease on the day.
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