Two days ago, the fifth largest Bitcoin whale moved a whopping 94,500 BTC from its wallet, equivalent to about 6 billion dollars, transferring them to 3 distinct cryptographic addresses.
This is a very rare event since the wallet in question had not made any transactions since 2019, when the cryptocurrency was worth around 10,000 USD.
Despite the various reports and investigations carried out by blockchain research companies, it has not yet been discovered to whom this address belongs.
Meanwhile, other entities continue to accumulate bitcoin incessantly.
All the details below.
Summary
Bitcoin wallet: a whale moves 6 billion dollars to 3 different cryptographic addresses after 5 years of inactivity
On March 25th the fifth largest Bitcoin wallet in terms of coins contained within it, after 5 years of inactivity, moved a sum equal to 94,500 BTC, equivalent to about 6 billion dollars, splitting the loot into 3 different addresses.
To contextualize the timing of the operation, we see how it happened just before Bitcoin recovered the fateful level of 70,000 USD, immediately after the market supply on Coinbase reached its lowest point in the last nine years at 344,856 BTC
After receiving the entire sum in September 2019, the whale in question has not made any further transfers, holding onto the multi-billion dollar loot like a true hodler.
The blockchain research company Arkham Intelligence was the first to notice the unusual coin movement, publicly reporting 2 days ago that the address labeled as “37X” was sending 5.03 billion dollars in BTC to “bc1q8yj”, while the remaining portion was split into two other wallets.
In fact, 561.46 million dollars and 488.40 million dollars in BTC were transferred to the addresses “bc1q6m5” and “bc1q592” respectively, leaving only 1.4 bitcoin as UTXO (change) in the original wallet of the whale.
No one has yet discovered the identity of the fifth richest bitcoin wallet in the world, which has meanwhile dropped one position in the ranking by splitting its loot into 3 addresses.
There are those who speculate that it could belong to an exchange, which likely could hold similar amounts, but there are very few interactions that can explain a connection with one of the existing cryptographic exchange platforms.
It is more likely that it is a company disconnected from this type of business or simply a wealthy patient investor, who has been able to wait for the appreciation of the crypto asset in the last 5 years.
The last time the whale moved those same BTC, they were worth just 1 billion dollars (about 10,580 dollars per BTC), while now the same individual can sit on a much larger gain.
However, we remember that the wealthy address is not the only inactive one to have made such a large transfer in the last period: in fact, at the beginning of the month another 3 billion dollar whale in BTC left its traces on-chain.
Another entity moved several coins that had remained intact for about 12 years to April of last year, valued at $11 million at the time.
The richest Bitcoin wallets in the world: private individuals, companies, ETFs, and governments
The whale that transferred its 94,500 BTC after 5 years of inactivity, now thanks to the splitting of its resources has dropped to the 6th position in the ranking of the richest bitcoin wallets in the world according to the rankings of Bitinfocharts, just above another entity with a similar equivalent value.
Note how the largest wallet for held coins is one of the various cold wallets of the Binance exchange, containing 248,597 BTC, valued at approximately 17.4 billion dollars
In second place another cold wallet, this time from Bitfinex, with a loot of 184,010 BTC, about 12.8 billion dollars
In third place we find the wallet “bc1ql49yda” which until May of last year had only 0.199 BTC, while now, after just 10 months, it has accumulated an incredible sum of 134.894 BTC, equivalent to 9.4 billion dollars.
The latest major purchases by the entity were made between February and March 2024.
Despite the large amounts of digital gold contained within them, these addresses do not exceed the wallet of the world’s richest cryptographic company, namely Microstrategy, which holds on its balance sheet (on behalf of its clients) the beauty of 214,246 BTC, equivalent to about 14 billion dollars.
Similarly, even Microstrategy itself does not surpass other types of entities that for some reason own Bitcoin within a cryptographic address.
Indeed, according to what is reported by Bitcointreasuries, we can observe that Grayscale and Blackrock’s wallets have now surpassed Michael Saylor’s DCA, sitting on a larger fortune.
Grayscale actually owns 342,608 BTC, equivalent to 23.8 billion dollars, while Blackrock’s Ishares owns 243,627 BTC valued at 16.9 billion dollars.
Overall, according to a recent Dune report, Bitcoin ETFs have recorded $58.3 billion in on-chain holdings, representing 4.17% of the current BTC supply.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that some governments of entire countries also hold substantial stakes in bitcoin: United States, China, United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, and El Salvador are the nations with the most orange cryptocurrencies in custody, where Americans rank first with 190,000 BTC seized from the Silk Road case and other operations.
