A long-dormant Bitcoin (BTC) whale has unloaded $29.75 million worth of the top crypto asset after sitting on it for nearly 13 years.
The blockchain-tracking platform Whale Alert first spotted the transaction, noting the ancient address sent all 1,005 BTC it owned to another unknown wallet.
The whale first received 1,000 Bitcoin all the way back in November 2010, when BTC was trading at $0.225, according to BitInfoCharts. The address then received another 5 BTC in April 2011, when Bitcoin was trading at $1.31. All in all, the whale’s Bitcoin holdings rose in value by a staggering 12,848,100% by the time of the transfer on Monday.
On numerous occasions in the past 12+ years, the wallet did receive minuscule amounts of Bitcoin, an indication of possible dusting attacks, which involve hackers and scammers sending trace amounts of a cryptocurrency (dust) to a large number of personal wallets in an attempt to break the wallet holders’ privacy.
Other actors such as academic researchers and law enforcement could also carry out dusting attacks for non-malicious reasons.
Transactions from long-dormant wallets typically drum up media interest because they generate chatter speculating that the BTC could be owned by Bitcoin’s secretive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Blockchain analysts estimate Nakamoto mined one million BTC, starting with the first 50 BTC reward for the genesis block on January 3rd, 2009. The last publicly verifiable online sighting of Satoshi was in December 2010.
In addition to the long-dormant wallet, Bitcoin whales took part in a number of other large transactions on Monday, including:
- 2,566 BTC worth nearly $75.5 million transferred from an unknown wallet to Coinbase
- 2,567 BTC worth more than $75.5 million transferred from a separate unknown wallet to Coinbase
- 10,798 BTC worth more than $317.7 million transferred from Gemini to an unknown wallet
- 3,201 BTC worth more than $94.5 million transferred from an unknown wallet to Coinbase
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