An ancient Bitcoin wallet suddenly sprung to life this week and moved more than $257 million worth of BTC after 11 years of slumber.
The crypto tracker Lookonchain first spotted the unknown address, which moved 2,700 BTC to another wallet on Tuesday.
The long-dormant wallet received the trove of BTC in December 2013, when the top crypto asset only cost $625.84. BTC was priced at $95,361 at the time of Tuesday’s transfer, meaning the USD value of the wallet’s holdings skyrocketed by a staggering 15,137.4% in 11 years.
Data from BitInfoCharts indicates the long-dormant wallet did receive trace amounts of Bitcoin a handful of times over the last 11 years, though those transactions appear to be the result of dusting attacks.
Dusting attacks involve hackers and scammers sending minuscule amounts of cryptocurrency (dust) to numerous personal wallets in an attempt to break the wallet holders’ privacy.
The scammers then try to trace the transactional activity of targeted wallets in order to identify the people or companies behind them.
Bitcoin is trading at $98,687 at time of writing. The top-ranked crypto asset by market cap is up more than 3% in the past 24 hours and is less than 1% down from its all-time high of $99,645, which it set on November 22nd.
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