Bitcoin has rocketed higher over the last 10 years, confounding its critics and making its mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto potentially one of the world’s richest people.

Bitcoin’s rise, which some think could be just getting started, has sparked huge interest in the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, who has remained anonymous despite multiple attempts to unmask them.

Now, as a perfect storm is heading toward bitcoin, a $8.6 billion anonymous bitcoin transfer just weeks after Arthur Britto, a cofounder of Ripple’s XRP, broke a 14-year silence has sparked wild speculation he could be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Last month, Arthur Britto, the mysterious cofounder of Ripple’s XRP Ledger who created it along with Jed McCaleb and David Schwartz in 2012, posted to X for the first time since creating his account in August 2011—a message consisting of just an emoji of a face without a mouth.

Britto’s reappearance after over a decade of obscurity was seized on by holders of Ripple’s XRP, who speculated about what the timing of his return might mean just as the XRP price has soared to levels not seen since 2017 over the last year.

Britto—in contrast to McCaleb and Schwartz who are both public figures in the world of bitcoin and crypto—has no verified photographs online and has never given an interview, cultivating a degree of mystery to rival Satoshi Nakamoto.

"Satoshi’s last known message was in April 2011," one XRP fan account posted to X, going on to suggest bitcoin was merely a precursor to XRP. “May 2011: David Schwartz starts building the XRP Ledger. August 2011: Arthur Britto joins Twitter. Now, 14 years later Britto reappears… and 14 years old dormant bitcoin wallets just moved.”

On Friday, bitcoin saw its largest transfer on record, with more than $8 billion worth of bitcoin that were mined during the network’s earliest days that’s sometimes called the “Satoshi era” moving for the first time.

Eight wallets were spotted moving 10,000 bitcoin each to new addresses, with the identity of the wallets’ owner remaining unknown—though one researcher speculated they might belong to Roger Ver, an early bitcoin investor known as bitcoin Jesus before backing a bitcoin fork called bitcoin cash and running afoul of the U.S. IRS over $48 million of tax it claims is owed.

The 80,000 bitcoin are now in new wallets using a modern address format, something that could have been done to prevent against future quantum computing attacks.

"Sure would be interesting if someone like Arthur Britto happened to control Satoshi’s BTC wallet," another X user posted, while others also fanned the flames of the theory that included speculation David Schwartz might be Satoshi Nakamoto.

“What if I told you Satoshi has been hidden in plain sight this entire time,” another XRP fan account posted alongside a photo of Schwartz apparently taken in 2012, in which he’s sporting a bitcoin miner t-shirt.

Schwartz has previously denied he’s Satoshi Nakamoto, posting to X that theories suggesting he developed bitcoin with former Ripple executive and engineer Nik Bougalis are, "not true, but it’s plausible."

Satoshi Nakamoto has been linked to dozens of different people over the the years by internet sleuths, researchers and reporters, from an obscure, now deceased computer scientist called Hal Finney all the way through to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (one crypto exchange executive has claimed Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity might already be known by some).

Just last year, HBO documentary film maker Cullen Hoback named Peter Todd, a bitcoin core developer who has been involved with bitcoin since 2010, as who he believes to be the real-world identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, though he failed to produce proof.

Almost all of the most likely names associated with the Satoshi Nakamoto name have denied they are Satoshi Nakamoto, except for Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, who fought a multi-year legal campaign to be recognised as bitcoin’s creator despite being unable to produce evidence.

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