A long-dormant Bitcoin whale wallet recently became active after over five and a half years, transferring over 8,000 BTC, valued at $536.5 million, from COINBASE cold storage.
Such a renaissance of long-term dormant Bitcoin wallets is often a result of investors and old miners selling their chunks of assets for profits.
Dormant Wallets Wakes Up
After over five years of dormancy, the Coinbase cold storage transferred a total stash of 8,000 BTC on June 11, 1:26 pm UTC, under block number 847,490, to Bitcoin wallet address “1ABww1.”
The receiving Bitcoin wallet later transferred the received stash of BTC to another BINANCE Deposit address at a fee of $108. Unlike in many cases, the two transactions worth over $1 billion did not include any test ones.
As per data provided by blockchain analytics firm ARKHAM Intelligence, the dormant Coinbase cold storage wallet received the funds in small chunks of 200 BTC between October 5, 2018, and December 5, 2018.
As Bitcoin is now priced at over $67,409, the transfer came after a +1,700% increase in the value of the BTC from the average acquisition price of $3,750 in 2018. Whether the wallet holder sold the stash after transferring to Binance remains unclear. However, such revivals of long-term dormant Bitcoin addresses are aimed at collecting profits.
This was not the first awakening of a long-term dormant Bitcoin address. On April 7, a decade-long dormant Bitcoin whale, with a stash of about 4,300 BTC, woke up and moved about 246 BTC. The wallet purchased Bitcoin over a decade ago at an average price of $29.39 and was selling at over 230,000% return on investment.
Miners Selling Their Stash?
Another group of Bitcoin stakeholders awakening large holdings is the old miners. For instance, on March 27, a Bitcoin miner’s wallet, which had been dormant for over 14 years, about 2,000 BTC received as mining rewards in 2010.
When receiving the BTC rewards, the total value of the BTC was only a few hundred dollars. However, at the time of wallet awakening, the value of the stash had surged exponentially to $140 million.
Recently, an average of 1 dormant wallet has woken up every month. A recent Chainalysis and Fortune report indicated that about 1.8 million Bitcoin addresses have remained on the sidelines for over a decade. Some of the decade-long dormant wallets are possibly lost forever due to lost passphrases.
