A Bitcoin wallet has come alive after five and a half years of inactivity, scooping out about $536 million worth of BTCs in a single transaction.
The BTCs were held in a Coinbase cold storage wallet all these years and were transferred to another wallet on June 11, on block 847,490. The subsequent block saw the BTCs transferred to a Binance account, implying that the assets would be liquidated, marking a tremendous payday.
However, ample information to know if they liquidated their assets is unavailable at the moment. The information available this far can be viewed here, courtesy of Arkham Intelligence.
Most often, transfers of this magnitude involve test transactions with minute amounts, especially after a wallet remains inactive for that long. This wallet skipped the test transfer stage and transacted hundreds of millions, totaling 8000 BTCs in single transactions.
That includes transactions from the Coinbase cold storage and the intermediate wallet receiving funds from the cold storage and routing them to Binance. Nevertheless, the Coinbase cold storage initially received 8,000 BTCs on December 5, 2018, in numerous batches of about 200 BTCs.
Since December 5, 2018, BTC prices have climbed over 1,700%. Its price then was just $3,750. Transactions from whale wallets after long periods of inactivity suggest liquidations – we will know soon if that is what this whale was up to, considering the massive profits they would realize by liquidating.
This wallet is not isolated in operating after years of inactivity. Dormant wallets often sprout back to life during bull cycles to realize profits. Recently, a wallet from the early days of Bitcoin, when Satoshi Nakamoto was still active on the interwebs, which remained inactive since became active and moved 687 BTCs. The assets, worth about $44 million during the transaction, were sent to two different wallets.
Chainalysis stats show that 1 in 1.8 million inactive Bitcoin wallets that have remained dormant for over a decade wake up monthly. However, a sizeable portion of those wallets are unusable due to their owners losing their private keys.