Crypto Whale Moves $1,000,000,000 in Bitcoin, Creates Richest Non-Exchange Address
A transfer of 94,504 Bitcoin worth $1.01 billion is triggering a frenzy of speculation on who is behind the curtain.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 94,504 #BTC (1,018,147,922 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 6, 2019
The transfer created the largest-known, non-exchange Bitcoin address, with the transaction fee costing 0.065 BTC, worth around $710 at time of publishing.
Crypto traders are pondering the possibility that crypto-related companies or exchanges are involved. The vast majority of the buzz on Twitter pins the transfer to the launch of Bakkt’s custody warehouse.
It could also be connected to VanEck, which rolled out an ETF-like product this week. But so far, there’s no hard evidence to support either theory.
The on-chain data research company TokenAnalyst is performing some forensics on the origins of the funds and found that a third of them came from addresses on the crypto exchange Huobi Global.
This indicates that the transfer could be the exchange moving its customer’s funds around in cold storage as a maintenance or security measure. So far, Huobi Global has not commented on the transaction.
$1 Billion+ $BTC was transferred in one transaction yesterday. Where did that come from? 🤔
We took a look and saw that a large percentage of it could be traced to @HuobiGlobal addresses pic.twitter.com/4jdeYMgyNG
— TokenAnalyst (@thetokenanalyst) September 6, 2019
On Wednesday, a movement of 23,999 BTC worth $55.20 million also caused a stir. The Bitcoin was sent from the crypto exchange OKEx to unknown wallets in eight separate transactions.
The company quickly moved to alleviate concern about the transfers and announced that the movements were part of scheduled maintenance.
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