Satoshi-Era Bitcoin Whale Moves $469 Million in BTC After 14 Years

In brief

A Bitcoin address on Thursday moved $469 million worth of the leading cryptocurrency.
The digital fortune had sat virtually unmoved since January 2011, blockchain data shows.
Earlier this month, a Bitcoin whale moved $8 billion in coins—shocking market observers.

A Bitcoin whale on Thursday moved its $469 million crypto fortune after holding it for more than 14 long years, blockchain data shows.

The investor—which could be a person or a company—loaded up on Bitcoin back in 2011, data from Arkham Intelligence shows.

It then sat virtually unmoved, apart from some tiny transactions, until Thursday morning Eastern Time, when over 3,962.6 BTC was transferred to a new wallet. The latest address had no previous movements, and had not been tagged as an exchange or other high-profile wallet by Arkham.

Back in 2011, the price of Bitcoin moved from $0.29 per coin to a high of $4.58, according to Bitbo data. The leading cryptocurrency’s blockchain went live in 2009.

Bitcoin was recently trading for $118,956 per coin, data from CoinGecko shows. The biggest and oldest cryptocurrency hit an all-time high price of $122,838 earlier this month.

At a price of $0.32 on the date that most of the coins were acquired, the whale’s stash skyrocketed in value by over 37,000,000% to the current price.

The whale accumulated the coins during the time that pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was still active, before disappearing from the internet in April 2011.

In the world of crypto, a whale is someone who holds a large amount of digital coins and tokens. A Bitcoin whale is usually defined by an entity that holds 1,000 BTC—worth nearly $119 million at today’s prices—or more.

It usually isn’t clear who such large holders of the biggest digital coin are, but industry analysts have previously said they can be people—or groups of people—involved in mining the asset in its early days.

Mysterious transfers of over $8 billion in Bitcoin baffled market observers earlier this month. The entity holding the huge stash of crypto similarly had not touched the digital coins for 14 years.

Myriad users strongly believe that the price of Bitcoin will remain over the $100,000 mark through the end of July, giving it a 98% probability as of this writing. (Disclosure: Myriad is a product of Decrypt‘s parent company, DASTAN.)