Dormant Bitcoin wallet moves $536M after over 5-year hiatus
A Bitcoin whale has transferred 8,000 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $536.5 million from a Coinbase cold storage wallet after five and a half years of dormancy.
Bitcoin address “1ABww1…mCSKq” received the entire 8,000 BTC stash at block 847,490 on June 11, 1:26 pm UTC, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.
That wallet then transferred all the Bitcoin to the Binance deposit address “15u4H…rMsLa” exactly one block and 11 minutes later, Arkham data shows. No test transactions were made prior to the two transfers.
The Coinbase cold-storage wallet originally received the 8,000 Bitcoin over dozens of transfers on Dec. 5, 2018, mostly in batches of 200 BTC.
Dormant addresses with large holdings suddenly becoming active could suggest selling, particularly if they go into an exchange deposit address.
While it isn’t clear whether the Bitcoin wallet owner cashed out, the transfer marked a nearly 1,700% increase from its acquisition price of $3,750 on Dec. 5, 2018.
Related: Bitcoin hash ribbons flash the first buy signal since $25K BTC price
It isn’t the first Bitcoin whale to have woken up in recent weeks, with two linked Bitcoin wallets also transferring a combined 1,000 Bitcoin — worth $61 million at the time — on May 12.
A week prior, a Satoshi Nakamoto-era Bitcoin wallet transferred 687 Bitcoin, worth nearly $44 million, to two separate addresses.
While at least one early Bitcoin wallet tends to wake up each month, nearly 1.8 million Bitcoin addresses have remained dormant for over a decade, according to an April 24 report by Chainalysis and Fortune.
These wallets, excluding Nakamoto’s wallet, equate to $121 billion worth of Bitcoin at current prices.
However, many of these wallet owners have lost or forgotten the seed phrases required to access their Bitcoin, so it isn’t clear how much of this can be retrieved.
Bitcoin recently suffered a price slump, falling 7.5% from a local high of $71,650 on June 7 to $66,250 on June 11.
Despite the drop, the crypto market sentiment-tracking Fear & Greed Index remains in the “Greed” zone with a score of 74 out of a total of 100.
Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?
