decrypt.co
The whales keep waking up. Today, another sleeping HODLer moved 400 Bitcoin—worth nearly $11 million at current prices—after not having transacted for nearly 12 years.
Monday’s movements showed the whale moved 360 BTC ($9.8 million) to one wallet while the remaining 40 BTC to a number of other locations.
The term “whale” refers to Bitcoin investors who have more of the cryptocurrency than others. The hoarders often sit on their millions of dollars in digital assets, and sometimes reemerge after a long stretch of time to move their investment to other addresses.
Such movements are becoming more commonplace: Just last week, a whale moved over 279 BTC, or $7.6 million, to new wallets after a decade of inactivity.
And in February, an old BTC address that had not budged in 11 years made a transaction by moving $9.6 million worth of the cryptocurrency. The coins had appreciated by 120,000,000% over the years, with the lucky investor having first received the Bitcoin when it was worth $8 a coin.
But although large movements do happen regularly, according to an analyst who spoke to Decrypt, an investor who hasn’t budged their coins in a decade isn’t too common.
Kirill Kretov, a developer of tools for automated trading, said: “An awakening of 2011 is rather rare, but we don’t know how much their owner has in total. It might be that recent large awakenings could also be attributed to the same entity.”
Whales are by far the most successful investors: Bitcoin is up over 40,000% in the past 10 years. Those who sit on the cryptocurrency for the long-term make the biggest profits, while inexperienced retail investors who buy and sell crypto in the short-term tend to lose out, research shows.
Today’s whale made a number of large transactions to move the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin right now is trading for about $27,280, according to CoinGecko, down more than10% in the past week, and 1.3% in the past 24 hours.