Yesterday the market adjusted, the whole market was buzzing because a whale woke up transferring 80K $BTC (More than 8 billion USD) to new wallets, with many side hypotheses, I have compiled and analyzed for your reference.
1. Specific event
- Yesterday, 80K #BTC woke up from mining wallets from the Satoshi era (2010–2011) and it was transferred to other wallets. Specific addresses of the wallets:
10K BTC => 1GcCK347TMbzHrRpDoVvJdR6eyECyqHCiU
10K BTC => bc1qmnjn0l0kdf3m3d8khc6cukj8deakg8m588z24g
10K BTC => bc1qymu2qf0d23qg38p9w7yxxt4yqjjg47rytxujl6
10K BTC => bc1qnzy2rr7g3688x62f8vrhgeclvtcs5hr50wzu0w
10K BTC => bc1q2lkyqvqqwus9pl96krgtk4rh0fqu8gtmpuwgmc
10K BTC => bc1qhtawge4km6juhlkrnvt7qjahhsc96qdlgf3c8t
10K BTC => bc1qwq5geath93h0lnfsrmnwnfuck2f9ypv4ewyl4j
2. On-chain characteristics
*Transaction characteristics:
- The BTC is split evenly 10K/ wallet => reflects the UTXO output splitting style from large wallets.
- Broadcast speed: fast, high fee => usually a multisig setup or refresh key.
- No outputs have been observed transferring to exchange wallets (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken).
3. Theories surrounding
- Conor from Coinbase discovered: Before 80K BTC moved, there was a test transaction using Bitcoin Cash (BCH) from the same private key. This test TX was small, occurring 14 hours before the main BTC move. So he hypothesizes that these old Bitcoin wallets were hacked/exposed keys => This remains a hypothesis.
- Some believe that quantum computers could revive old Bitcoin wallets by hacking lost old private keys, which is a big FUD because if BTC gets unlocked, it would be very serious for the entire crypto & blockchain industry.
- There is another perspective suggesting that this news is FUD, and that miners from 2010–2011 might have swept old keys => they are moving to SegWit/multisig wallets. And if they only refresh the key, there is no risk of selling on the market.
- There are other opinions that more observation is needed because this BTC is not directly moving to exchanges, so there is no selling pressure, but if these early miners want to sell, they might split their wallets again and sell OTC.
4. This news makes many small whales confused.
- Quantity $BTC more than 8 billion USD is not large with the current market, but you can see the chart below and understand that more than 30.4% of BTC has not been active for over 5 years.
- This means that if the 14-year-old wallet addresses come back to life, the remaining ones could also potentially revive similarly (as the reasons are still unknown), so if this number also revives, the amount of BTC in circulation could be extremely large.
- According to this news, a whale sent 1,550 $BTC (167.36 million USD) to #Binance due to being scared by this news last night.
- But alongside that, there are also some opportunistic whales, one address withdrew 567.3 BTC from Binance at 3 AM, worth 61.11 million dollars.
- There is still much more distorted information.
5. My personal conclusion
- The hypothesis of being hacked is not very convincing to me, although I have not seen any reasonable opinions regarding this action, but it might not be a hack.
- Anyone who has been through several seasons has seen a lot of such FUD news, back in 2020-2021, the hacked wallet address with 120K BTC from Bitfinex also transferred a test of over 70 million USD, causing many to worry and BTC price dropped by 20% (I will leave the link in the comment).
- At that time, the total amount of BTC moved from the Bitfinex hack cluster from 2020-2022 was about 96,857 BTC to new wallet addresses, and nothing happened afterwards.
- What do you think?
#steven_research
