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Share link:In this post: The ancient whale is still unidentified, though blockchain detectives have linked it to an ENS vanity name. The inflow of funds to Kraken can also be a tool to mix the coins and disconnect them from the known address. BTC remains in long-term holding, with more than 16M of the supply unmoved for at least 155 days, though the real ancient whales have held for more than a decade.
An ancient whale that mined some of the first Bitcoin (BTC) blocks is moving more coins to exchanges. The coins, back from the early Satoshi Nakamoto era, are valued at $630K.
An ancient Bitcoin (BTC) whale, with more than $75M in Bitcoin holdings, has moved funds to Kraken again. The whale once again moved $630K worth of BTC to the exchange, just a week after a similar deposit.
Kraken is already one of the exchanges with strong inflows. In the past day, the market received 6,974.08 BTC, boosting the monthly inflows to 12,835.28 BTC. Kraken is one of the markets most often used for cashing out due to its fiat pairs and the availability of Eurozone-based fiat transfers.
So far, the whale has moved around $5.74M BTC to Kraken, presumably to cash out. However, exchanges have often been used as mixers before moving to another set of wallets. The recent selling from the whale barely affected the market, where BTC rallied based on the effect of leveraged positions and options.
The wallet holds another 1,139 BTC, which the spot market could easily absorb. The coins were parked for more than a decade in a different wallet, after the initial rewards were moved and consolidated.
The whale’s identity is still not discovered, though speculations abound. One of the blockchain investigations ties the whale’s wallet to early Mt. Gox funding, as well as the Ethereum ICO. TruthLabs links the wallet to the ENS name OliverJanssens.eth, a name that expired in May 2023. However, the address on Ethereum is still active and engaging in NFT activities on OpenSea.
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The whale’s moves put a horizon on the potential to hold BTC without cashing out even a part of the coins. The whale’s move follows a series of transactions from the end of September when five addresses moved their early 50 BTC rewards and made the coins virtually untraceable through CoinJoin transactions.
One of the hypotheses for the whale’s actions ties the coins to Hal Finney, the legendary cryptography researcher who received some of the earliest transactions from Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney is known to have mined after the block height of 70, in the very earliest days of BTC.
The recent moves from early wallets coincide with renewed speculations on the real-life identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. HBO’s production “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” proposed several candidates for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but in the end, the mystery remains unsolved. What is known is that most of the coins on Satoshi’s addresses have never been moved.
One of the biggest yet unfounded fears is that some early BTC addresses could be compromised, and some of the wallets may be cracked or exploited in some way.
BTC stays in the hands of long-term holders
The supply of BTC in the wallets of long-term holders is near an all-time high. A total of 16,122,747 BTC are considered to be in the hands of long-term holders, based on a cut-off of holding for 155 days or more. The holdings also include most of the coins of miners.
See also $2bn was lost to crypto crimes in H1 2024 but investor popularity surged
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