Bitcoin Whale Moves 500 BTC Dormant Since 5+ Years Ago

On-chain data shows that a Bitcoin whale has recently transferred around 500 BTC that had previously been dormant for around 5 to 7 years.

Bitcoin used output Age band shows peak in 5-7 year old coins

As pointed out by an analyst in a CryptoQuant post, this 500 BTC move has come after the 5k BTC shift in 7 year+ old coins a while back.

The relevant indicator here is “Spent Output Age Bands” (SOAB), which tells us how many coins the various Bitcoin age bands are transferring on-chain at the moment.

The age classes refer to groups based on how long a coin has been sitting in a particular address. For example, any coin that has shown no movement for between 2 and 3 years will be included in the 2-3 year band.

If this coin is transferred to another wallet, the movement will naturally appear as a peak under SOAB in 2-3 years.

Now the relevant age group is 5-7 years. Here is a chart showing the output of Bitcoin used for this group:

Looks like the metric has noted a spike during recent days | Source: CryptoQuant

As you can see in the graph above, the Bitcoin 5-7 age group observed a sharp value just a couple of days ago.

The spent production amounted to around 500 BTC that was moved, possibly by a whale. While this transfer is significant, it is still much less than the 5k movement of 7-10 year old coins some time ago.

So where did this latest transfer go? The exchange rate SOAB, a modified version of the metric that measures movements specifically involving exchanges and not the entire chain, may contain hints of that.

The chart below highlights the trend in this indicator.

The value of the metric hasn't been that high recently | Source: CryptoQuant

From the graph, it is clear that there have been no out-of-norm peaks for the exchange inflow SOAB in recent days.

This suggests that the whale transaction of the 5-7 year old coins was probably not going to centralized exchange wallets. Thus, it was likely an over-the-counter (OTC) deal if the whale made the transfer with the intent to dump. But if it wasn’t, then maybe it was just a transfer to another personal wallet.

BTC price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price is hovering around $19.1k, down 2% in the last week. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 3% in value.

BTC has moved sideways during the last two days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Rod Long on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, CryptoQuant.com