Out of the blue, a Bitcoin whale that had been inactive since 2010 sprung to life Wednesday, moving the long dormant coins to five new addresses via several transactions.
The BTC was mined just a year after Bitcoin’s inception, and the miner has held on to the stash for the entire time.
Dormant Moves $14 Million Worth Of BTC After 11 Years
According to on-chain data collected by LookOnChain, an early crypto miner moved 250 Bitcoin today after 11 years of leaving the holdings untouched.
The user diligently accumulated 250 BTC from mining through five wallets in 2010. The coins, worth around $13.95 million as of August 7, were transferred to five wallet addresses.
As expected, the wider cryptocurrency community also took note of the BTC awakening, with some speculating whether Bitcoin’s mystical inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, was back.
Satoshi is alive
— ozmoz.eth (@Capitanozand) August 7, 2024
However, it is entirely possible that an old-time miner might have just found a hard drive dating back to 2010 and decided to move their old block rewards or liquidate them.
A closer look at the blockchain data shows the miner’s initial mining reward of 250 BTC was valued at a mere $28,080 when mined back in May 2013. However, it has since surged to a whopping $14,022,065 as of the transfer date — representing a profit of over $13.9 million.
As ZyCrypto reported previously, another dormant BTC wallet holding 26 BTC recently transferred its cache to a new address. The BTC had been obtained in 2012 at an estimated value of $301, while its total value when it was moved last month was around $1.81 million.
“Something Is Happening”
The latest transfer coincides with CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju observing that roughly $22.8 billion worth, or 404,448 BTC, has transferred to “permanent holder addresses” over the past 30 days, “and it’s clearly accumulation”.
“I’m pretty sure something is happening behind the scenes,” Young Ju declared on X.
Young Ju’s remarks indicate that the movement of these long-dormant coins may be part of a wider Bitcoin accumulation trend. The movement of over 400,000 BTC to cold storage wallets signals a bullish sentiment among investors.
As of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $57,324 as the flagship crypto attempts to rebound from Monday’s mega sell-off.