Recently, a Bitcoin whale wallet has been inactive for over five and a half years, transferring over 8,000 BTC, valued at $536.5 million, from Coinbase’s cold storage.
This revival of long-dormant Bitcoin wallets is often the result of investors and old miners selling their assets for profit.
Dormant wallets wake up
After more than five years of latency, Coinbase cold storage transferred a total deposit of 8,000 BTC on June 11 at 13:26 UTC, under block number 847490, to the wallet address of Bitcoin “1ABww1”.
The receiving Bitcoin wallet later transferred the received BTC storage to another Binance deposit address for a fee of $108. Unlike many cases, the two transactions worth more than $1 billion did not include any evidence.
According to data provided by blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, Coinbase’s cold storage wallet received the funds in small chunks of 200 BTC between October 5, 2018 and December 5, 2018. 2018
With Bitcoin now priced above $67,409, the transfer follows a +1,700% increase in BTC’s value from its average purchase price of $3,750 in 2018. It is unclear whether the wallet holder sold the storage after transferring it to Binance. However, these revivals of long-term dormant Bitcoin addresses aim to collect profits.
This was not the first awakening of a long-term inactive Bitcoin address. On April 7th, a decade-dormant Bitcoin whale, with a deposit of about 4,300 BTC, woke up and moved about 246 BTC. The wallet bought Bitcoin over a decade ago at an average price of $29.39 and was selling at a return on investment of over 230,000%.
Do miners sell their deposit?
Another group of Bitcoin stakeholders that arouses large participation are former miners. For example, on March 27, a Bitcoin miner’s wallet, which had been inactive for more than 14 years, moved about 2,000 BTC received as mining rewards in 2010.
Upon receiving the BTC rewards, the total BTC value was only a few hundred dollars. However, by the time of the wallet’s awakening, the value of the storage had increased exponentially to $140 million.
Recently, an average of 1 inactive wallet has been woken up every month. A recent report by Chainalysis and Fortune indicated that around 1.8 million Bitcoin addresses have been kept in the sidelines for more than a decade. Some of the wallets that have been inactive for a decade are possibly lost forever due to lost passphrases.
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