As 10,000 long-dormant bitcoins are finally traded, observers wonder what’s going on
Unusual blockchain data appears to show large blocks of bitcoin worth more than $200 million moving for the first time in years, leaving cryptoanalysts scratching their heads and worrying about what to do with it — if anything at all.
On August 28, according to a post by crypto data analysis platform CryptoQuant, 5,000 BTC that hadn’t moved in at least seven years was transacted. The next day, LookIntoBitcoin’s data tracker showed another 5,000 BTC transferred again.
Analysts say the transaction data is not enough to draw any major conclusions and there is no hard evidence as to why the coins were moved. It is possible that a long-term holder is looking to exit the market, even with bitcoin prices around $20,000, well away from their all-time high of nearly $69,000. Or it could just be that the holder simply make any administrative changes to the account status.
“It’s definitely not a bullish sign,” CryptoQuant said. – It is difficult to say what effect it will have.
Antoine Le Calvez, lead blockchain data engineer at Coin Metrics, also noticed the transactions. He suggested that the coins are somehow related to the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
“From most likely to least likely, an old Kraken cold storage address, a Kraken OTC (over the counter) deal, a Kraken user,” he told CoinDesk in an email.
Kraken did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It has long been a bit of a spectator sport in crypto to watch long-dormant bitcoin move. In May 2020, the market was briefly rattled by speculation that Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto might be moving around a small group of the cryptocurrency. Wallets marked to Nakamoto – which have never been definitively identified – are closely monitored by cryptanalysts. His treasure is so large that if it were liquidated, the price of bitcoin would fall.
This is not the first time this year that large long-dormant BTC transactions have been discovered. The CryptoQuant post said that more than 10,000 BTC were moved when the BTC price was at $47,700 in March, 2,800 BTC were moved in May, and more than 1,100 BTC were moved at $23,000 per coin in July.
“The broader trend among addresses holding between 1,000 and 10,000 BTC has been to increase their holdings over the past month, with their combined balance climbing by 35,000 BTC,” Lucas Outumuro, head of research at IntoTheBlock, told CoinDesk.
Bitcoin’s price
Theoretically, keeping coins in different wallets could help investors manage their holdings more efficiently in times of high market volatility, and industry experts said it didn’t seem all that unusual for wallets in this age to move.
“We regularly see early bitcoin wallets like this become active,” Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, told CoinDesk in an email.
It may also be that the bitcoin market has matured to the point where major macroeconomic developments, such as interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, inflation reports, or the August jobs report can have a greater impact on bitcoin’s price than a few isolated and unexplained data points.
IntoTheBlock’s Outumuro said the bitcoin data may be “secondary to macro correlations in the short term, as there is less liquidity in the system.”
For what it’s worth, the recent coin transfers came shortly after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said last week that the central bank is likely to maintain an aggressive campaign to curb rising inflation — a stance that could in turn keep downward pressure on the prices of risky assets. , from stocks to cryptocurrencies.
BTC’s price fell below $20,000 after Powell’s speech. It recently traded for around $20,300.
