A whale who had held onto a Bitcoin fortune for 14 years on Friday started moving the enormous stash of 80,000 BTC—worth $8.6 billion at today's prices.
The coins started moving in batches of 10,000 BTC, or about $1 billion in BTC, early morning New York time on Friday, data from Arkham Intelligence shows. By 11 a.m. Eastern Time, the $8.6 billion in crypto had been shifted to new addresses.
Eagle-eyed blockchain observers were quick to point out on X that the movements came from an entity that had received the coins back in 2011 as "coinbase" transactions—the first transaction in a block created by miners. When miners create new blocks on the blockchain, they are rewarded with newly minted digital coins.
CryptoQuant's head of research Julio Moreno told Decrypt: "It is the largest daily movement of coins aged 10 years or more in history." He added that the previous record for a whale that held onto crypto for this long was a transaction of 3,700 BTC, which pales in comparison.
Crypto analyst for CryptoQuant J.A. Maartun wrote on X: "In eight years of analyzing Bitcoin, I've never seen anything like this," noting that the entity linked to the Bitcoin addresses which made transactions on Friday has over the years held about 200,000 BTC at one point.
Conor Grogan, the director of America's biggest crypto exchange Coinbase, posted on X that the entity linked to the addresses had a fortune of $21.5 billion—making them one of the top five largest holders of Bitcoin in crypto history.
Grogan added that if he had to guess, the Bitcoin wallet likely belongs to an "OG miner," meaning someone who was very early to mining BTC on the network.
In the world of crypto, a whale is someone who holds a large amount of digital coins and tokens. A Bitcoin whale is usually defined by an entity that holds 1,000 BTC—worth $108 million at today's prices—or more.
Experts previously told Decrypt that although difficult to tell, whales are not always individual investors but also companies that got involved in mining crypto early. Though, given that the stash of coins moving today were acquired years before the industrial Bitcoin mining age, it's anyone's guess as to whether the holdings belong to a single person or group.
Bitcoin was recently trading for $107,895 per coin, according to CoinGecko, after dropping by nearly 2% over a 24-hour period. The leading cryptocurrency is about 4% down from the record high of $111,814 it set in May.
When whales start moving their coins after years of "HODLing," markets tend to move as investors expect imminent selling and therefore downward price action.
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