As first reported by CryptoCoinsNews (CCN), a crypto wallet containing $720 million worth of Bitcoin and an unknown owner have woken up after four years of hibernation, with more than $100 million moved to Bitfinex and Binance over the last several weeks.
The mysterious wallet contains a mindboggling 11,114 BTC, equivalent to around 0.52 percent of the total supply.
Redditor u/sick_silk noticed the sudden movement of these dormant coins in late August, through tracking each transaction in detail on the blockchain, accompanied with graphs representing the activity.
According to the Redditor, one of two sources could be the owner of this mysterious Bitcoin whale.
The first post was published on August 31 suggests that the funds may be linked to the now-defunct dark web market Silk Road, which was an online black market, best known as a platform for selling drugs, illegal weapons and pornography, malware, hacking services, and other black market goods.
u/Sick_Silk points out:
“It seems that the owner of a huge SilkRoad related wallet is moving funds actively since 3 days, dividing it in chunks of 100 coins by subwallets. The original wallet owned 111,114.62 BTC / BCH , which is currently valuated ~ $844M (without taking in account other Bitcoin forks). Last movements on these subwallets are 4 years and 5 months old (March 9th, 2014). The chunks have been divided over time to 60,000 coins then to 30,000 / 20,000 / 10,000 / 5,000 / 500 and now 100 coins.”
CCN said u/sick_silk connected the original crypto address to the Silk Road via the following bitcointalk thread in which user assortmentofsorts connects the dots to from an address operated by DPR (Dread Pirate Roberts AKA Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road) to the one in the Reddit post over the course of six traced transactions.
After more digging, u/sick_silk is more confident that the funds could belong to an old Mt Gox wallet. This theory is backed up by Bitcoin Security specialist WizSec, who tweeted:
They guessed right later in the post; it's an old MtGox whale, unrelated to Silk Road.
— WizSec (@wizsecurity) September 4, 2018
u/Sick_Silk generated custom graphs to represent the movement of the funds. The charts below represent a $100 million being moved to Binance and Bitfinex:
“Below you will find a graph representation of the transactions sent over time from the original 111,114-BTC wallet to the most recent wallets which have received some of the coins. Each branch represents a sequence of transactions sent through several wallets. Red nodes indicate the most recent transactions (< 1 month), blue nodes indicate quite recent ones (<1 year), and green nodes are the older ones ( > 1 year),” said u/Sick_Silk.
Figure 1: Here is the location of the original wallet within the graph (15ihHoGs3onQBNnEH8afDFGvou9nD62Hm7).
Figure 2: Original coins are currently transferred on Binance wallet, in fact, it is a major end-point/aggregate of transactions originated from the 111,114-BTC wallet (1NDyJtNTjmwk5xPNhjgAMu4HDHigtobu1s).
Figure 3: Coins are being sold on Binance, here 100 BTC transferred to Binance wallet on August 29th (174EZQcfnJS5ChVsTbZaJMmjFCYykMLu9t).
Figure 4: Funds are currently actively mixed, you can see a chain of red nodes with no other purpose than transferring n time the coins and splitting/mixing it a bit (3Ah15skNb8R1teRWs6h2Q2vRywkLJWUhhb).
u/Sick_Silk said the wallet’s owner had been actively splitting the original 111,114 BTC/USD this past month; some of the coins are currently being dumped on Binance (Figure 2 and 3).
The mysterious Bitcoin whale is actively breaking up the order to conceal the transfers (Figure 4), as it seems the real-world ramifications is that someone is about to dump a whole lot of supply.
u/Sick_Silk firmly believes that the movement of coins could be due to Bitcoin’s volatility that was seen in August, and whether that is true or not, CNBC continues to pump Bitcoin telling their audience members that now is the perfect time to buy.