On Aug. 7, at block height 908992, a major whale finally stirred, moving a hefty 3,000 bitcoins—valued at more than $348 million—that had been sitting untouched since 2015. It was the first time these coins had budged in 9 years and 273 days.
Mystery Whale Moves $348M in BTC as 30 Old Wallets Reactivate
A hefty stash of long-silent bitcoins came to life on Thursday, as a holder with wallets dating back to 2015 moved 3,000 BTC—worth $348.72 million based on prices at 9 a.m. Eastern time that morning. Over the past two months, OG bitcoin whales have been quietly reviving strings of vintage wallets as BTC holds strong above the $110,000 mark.
In this latest move, discovered by the Bitcoin blockchain parser btcparser.com, the whale shifted 3,000 BTC across 30 separate transactions, each drawing from a Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) address containing exactly 100 BTC.
Rather than merging the funds into fewer accounts, the coins were dispersed across a wide set of Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) wallets. This particular move was different than the other strings of dormant BTC spends over the last two months.
Privacy was factored in—as some of the transfers scored an 80 out of 100 on Blockchair’s privacy tool. The platform flagged repeated input addresses and noted the likely use of software that mirrors the change address type to match the recipient’s.
The original 30 wallets were funded on Nov. 10, 2015, when bitcoin closed the day at just $336 apiece. Back then, the 3,000 BTC stash was only worth $1.008 million. At today’s value of $348.72 million, that’s a 34,548% gain against the U.S. dollar.