u.today
Crypto tracker @lookonchain has spotted an ancient crypto wallet awakening and moving tens of millions of US dollars worth of Bitcoin. This wallet has not been used for 11.3 years, as also reported by the popular blockchain tracking account Whale Alert.
Now, it seems, the whale has moved his BTC to sell it. Just as early as a few years ago, such dormant whales stirring and moving massive Bitcoin stashes could cause the Bitcoin price to go down.
Ancient Bitcoins moved by a Satoshi-era wallet
The aforementioned whale has transferred 1,037.42 worth $37.8 million, according to @lookonchain. This wallet received this BTC on April, 2012, when it was evaluated at $5,107 and the flagship (back then, the only crypto aside LTC), digital coin traded at $4.92.
A BTC whale that has been dormant for 11 years transferred all 1,037.42 $BTC($37.8M) to a new address"bc1qtl" an hour ago.
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 22, 2023
The whale received 1,037.42 $BTC($5,107 at that time) on Apr 11, 2012, when the price was $4.92.https://t.co/k8ZmO5vc8X pic.twitter.com/xBaw2dQfY8
This happened when the shadow of the mysterious Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was still hanging above the crypto community. Nakamoto vanished from the public eye in December 2010. His last message on the Bitcoin forum was registered on December 12, in which the IT genius stressed the importance of improving protection against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks from hackers.
@lookonchain also stated that the whale moved the BTC to a brand-new wallet, still this may indicate an intention to sell in the future.
Here’s main reason why old wallets start to awaken
In the past, there have been many reported by the media cases when owners of ancient wallets have lost their private keys if they were written on a piece of paper and locked somewhere in a safe place or simply forgot them. Later, some of those people managed to recover their private keys and seed phrases and so a lot of such “Satoshi-era” wallets started to awaken.
There is a possibility that this was a similar case. Earlier this week, U.Today several times reported the awakening of ancient Ethereum whales, who obtained their ETH during the ICO in 2014.
At the time of this writing, Bitcoin is changing hands at $29,890, having slipped below the crucial support level of $30,000 on July 16.