A sleeping Bitcoin whale moved $536.5 million

After five and a half years of inactivity, Bitcoinwhale, Coinbase ( COIN) moved 8,000 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $536.5 million from his cold storage wallet.

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence noted that Bitcoin address “1ABww1…mCSKq” acquired the entire 8,000 BTC chunk at block 847,490 at 13:26 UTC on June 11.

This wallet then, exactly one block and 11 minutes later, sent all Bitcoin to the Binance storage address “15u4H…rMsLa”. According to Arkham data, not a single test process was carried out before the two transfers.

Precious movement of dormant Bitcoins

Dormant addresses with significant assets suddenly becoming active may indicate a sale, especially if they go to an exchange warehouse address.

Although the owner of the Bitcoin wallet is unknown, the transaction represented an increase of almost 1,700% from the purchase price of $3,750 on December 5, 2018.

Two linked BTC accounts also sent 1,000 BTC worth $61 million in total on May 12, another BTC whale that has woken up in recent weeks.

A week ago, a BTC wallet belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto moved 687 BTC worth approximately $44 million to two different addresses.

According to an analysis by Chainalysis and Fortune on April 24, approximately 1.8 million BTC addresses have been dormant for more than a decade, and at least one early BTC wallet usually wakes up every month. At current prices, these wallets – excluding Nakamoto’s wallet – are worth $121 billion, equivalent to Bitcoin.

However, it is unclear how much of this amount can be recovered, as many of these wallet users have lost or forgotten the seed words required to access their Bitcoins. BTC, which fell from its local peak of $71,650 on June 7 to $66,250 on June 11, has recently experienced a 7.5% price decrease.

Despite the decline, the Fear & Greed Index, which tracks the sentiment of the crypto market, still remains in the “risk appetite” zone with 74 points out of 100.

This news was first published on the Coin Engineer website.