Vintage 2012 and 2013 Bitcoin Wallets Move Millions After Years of Inactivity

As January draws to a close, a bitcoin wallet that had remained untouched since its creation on May 17, 2012, suddenly sprang to life, moving 204.46 $BTC—now valued at $21.4 million—for the first time in nearly 13 years. Shortly after this transaction, two additional dormant addresses from 2013 followed suit, each spending 200 $BTC, marking their first activity since inception.

Old Bitcoin Wallets Reactivate as Prices Stay Above $100K

On Thursday, a legacy pay-to-public-key-hash (P2PKH) wallet, dormant since 2012, sprang to life, transferring 204.46 $BTC for the first time since its creation. When the address was first funded, bitcoin ($BTC) traded at just $5.09 per coin, valuing the stash at approximately $1,040.70. At today’s exchange rates, the holdings have appreciated to $21.4 million, reflecting an extraordinary 2,055,668% increase.

The funds were sent to a “bc1q” Bech32 address at block height 881,391, where they remain at the time of writing. Blockchair’s privacy tool assigned the transaction a score of 45 out of 100, citing repeated use of the same address in inputs and the selection of the “send everything” option. Just 59 blocks later, at height 881,450, a P2PKH wallet created on Dec. 30, 2013, followed suit, moving 100 $BTC for the first time since its inception. The movement of these long-dormant funds was detected by btcparser.com, an onchain monitoring tool that tracks aged bitcoin transactions between 2009 through 2017.

This sum, valued at $10.4 million, was similarly transferred to a Bech32 bitcoin address. Blockchair’s privacy tool gave this transaction an identical score for the same privacy-related factors. Later, at block 881,547, another wallet—created just a day later on Dec. 31, 2013—relocated 101.28 $BTC, marking its first movement since the funds were received. The transaction mirrored the previous two in both structure and destination, with the $BTC shifting to a newly generated Bech32 address.

Bitcoin.com News recently covered the rising activity of long-dormant bitcoin wallets as $BTC’s price stays above the $100,000 threshold. Some entities have been initiating dust transfers before executing much larger transactions. Meanwhile, whales have been steadily accumulating these rediscovered stashes, with data from Santiment indicating that bitcoin wallets holding between 100 and 1,000 $BTC have reached an all-time high. Some of these early adopters appear fully aware that their long-held reserves are in high demand.