In brief
- A wallet holding 4,581.94 BTC sent its full balance, worth about $377 million, to five new addresses on Oct. 12 in a single transaction that paid a fee of 732 sats.
- The coins arrived in March 2020, when they were worth roughly $40.5 million.
- The address received 22 dust deposits since 2020, including 600 sats on Jan. 28, 2025 from a look-alike address matching its first three and last four characters.
A Bitcoin wallet that has held 4,581.94 BTC since March 2020 sent its entire balance to five new addresses on Oct. 12, moving about $377 million in a single transaction, according to blockchain data. The transfer confirmed in block 971,126 at about 18:37 UTC, with Bitcoin trading around $82,350.
Four of the receiving addresses got exactly 1,000 BTC each, and the fifth received 581.94 BTC. The transaction paid a fee of 732 satoshis, the hundred-millionth-of-a-bitcoin units known as sats, or about 60 cents. As of block 971,279 on Oct. 13, none of the five addresses has spent anything, and it is unclear who controls the wallet or where the coins are going.
The wallet received its coins on March 3, 2020, in a transaction that split a 5,081.95 BTC balance three ways, with 250 BTC going to each of two other addresses. At roughly $8,830 per Bitcoin, the 4,581.95 BTC that landed in the wallet was worth about $40.5 million. The value of the Bitcoin has nearly increased by 10X since then.
The wallet is an example of patience. The coins have sat through several market shocks since they arrived, starting with the COVID-19 crisis, which started shortly after the wallet got funded. During that time the stash went from about $40.5 million to about $17.6 million.
Tesla’s suspension of Bitcoin payments and China’s mining crackdown followed in May 2021, tanking the wallet from about $291 million at its April peak to $131 million by June. The Terra, Celsius and FTX collapses in 2022 would have taken the value down to about $71 million, a loss of about $239 million from the November 2021 peak, as the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes also dragged the S&P 500 down about 25% and Bitcoin hit a two-year low.
Trump’s tariff shock cut also crashed the markets. Bitcoin has since fallen 54% from a record $124,728 to $57,735 before recovering to its current price. The wallet’s value dropped from $571.5 million to about $265 million during that dip, but overall, hodling has resulted in almost 10X of net gains since day 1.
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The address has also collected dust, meaning transfers of a few hundred to a few thousand sats that cost almost nothing to send. Blockchain data shows 22 such deposits between August 2020 and May 2026, ranging from 546 to 6,953 sats, or less than $6 each at current prices. Sixteen arrived in batch transactions that paid out to between 87 and 610 addresses at once.
One deposit matches the pattern of address poisoning, in which an attacker generates an address that copies the first and last characters of a real one, hoping someone later copies it from a transaction history by mistake. On Jan. 28, 2025, an address beginning 18VpNbPc and ending pQ9x sent the wallet 600 sats, and it shares the first three and last four characters with the whale’s address.
The look-alike was funded in a Nov. 12, 2024 transaction that paid out to 1,401 outputs at once, and it was emptied after sending that one payment. Every other sender used a bc1 address, which looks nothing like the wallet’s legacy 18 address.
The whale hasn’t fallen for it.
Large holders of Bitcoin, known as whales, move their coins for different reasons, including privacy and safety. Analysts and traders fear that moves like that precede selling as holders feel tempted to realize significant gains.
That said, this is not the first time dormant wallets move their coins. Back in July 2025, an entity moved 80,000 BTC that had sat for 14 years, worth $8.6 billion, the biggest daily movement of coins aged 10 years or more. Ten days later a Satoshi-era wallet sent 40,009 BTC, about $4.7 billion, to Galaxy, which later said it had executed a sale worth roughly $9 billion for a Satoshi-era client.
As of Oct. 13, the original address holds 23,288 sats in leftover dust, about $19, while the five receiving addresses hold the full 4,581.94 BTC.
