Martti Malmi – The Forgotten Pioneer Who Let Go of 55,000 BTC
In Bitcoin’s early days, before Wall Street funds and billion-dollar ETFs, there was Martti Malmi — a Finnish developer who worked side by side with Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Malmi wasn’t just another coder; he was the man who gave Bitcoin its first face by building the first Bitcoin GUI and co-running bitcoin.org.
Back then, Bitcoin was an experiment, not a global asset. Malmi mined relentlessly, amassing an astonishing 55,000 BTC when it was virtually worthless. In fact, in 2009 he sold 5,050 BTC for just $5.02 — the very first recorded BTC-to-fiat trade.
By 2012–2013, he decided to sell his entire stash, averaging only a few dollars per coin. The total? Roughly $300,000 — enough to buy a house and secure some stability, but a fraction of what those coins would be worth today.
📊 To put this in perspective:
At the 2017 peak (~$20,000), that stash = $1.1 billion
At the 2021 ATH (~$69,000), that stash = $3.8 billion
Even in 2025, it would still be worth billions
And yet, Malmi says he has no regrets. He doesn’t measure his story in lost billions, but in the fact that he helped Bitcoin survive its infancy and become the unstoppable force it is today.
His legacy is not of loss, but of vision — a reminder that the greatest pioneers don’t always walk away with riches, but with something rarer: the pride of knowing they changed the world.
