Today, Twitter’s Whale Alert account showed a billion-dollar Bitcoin transaction with a very small fee. It was 123,447 BTC equal to $1,097,343,503 confirmed on the Bitcoin blockchain, for which a fee of only 0.00005578 BTC equal to $0.49 was paid.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 123,447 #BTC (1,097,343,503 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 15, 2020
Adding right after that:
ℹ️ This is the change of an interal #Bitfinex transaction.
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 16, 2020
In fact, according to Whale Alert, it would be a transaction involving an anonymous Bitfinex outbound account to another anonymous incoming account.
Analyzing the same transaction directly on the Bitcoin blockchain it is also possible to verify the amount of fees paid for this transaction and the result is in fact a fee equal to a value lower than 50 cents of US dollars.
The involvement of Bitfinex then saw comments on Twitter requesting explanations directly from the CTO of Bitfinex, Paolo Ardoino.
Ardoino has thus commented on the matter:
This is a 1.5k BTC hot wallet refill.
123k went to change address.https://t.co/BAfrMtIOUb https://t.co/zzkXp6ZHw0— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) January 15, 2020
“It’s a 1.5k BTC refill of hot wallet and resulting change address movement. @whale_alert anyway this can be improved”.
Immediately afterwards, another tweet from Ardoino says:
We have proof that moving 1B on BTC does not cost much. https://t.co/zzkXp6ZHw0
— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) January 15, 2020
“We have proof that moving 1B on BTC does not cost much”.
Whale Alert is famous for warning the crypto community about the movements of the so-called “whales”, i.e. those accounts that, given the size of their crypto movements, could end up manipulating the market, sometimes managing to remain anonymous.
Thanks to the use of special APIs to track significant crypto movements, Whale Alert had provided support to the Binance exchange in May 2019 following the 7,000 BTC hacker attack.
This has nothing to do with the current situation: thanks to the transparency of Bitcoin’s blockchain and Bitfinex’s CTO, it was possible to receive direct comments about it, while at the same time noting the very low fees on high-value BTC transactions.
