Amidst the ongoing market turmoil for bitcoin
BTC
cursors down
$17,126
and other cryptocurrencies, some big investors are getting up to move their BTC holdings that have been untouched for nearly a decade.
According to on-chain data, seven dormant bitcoin wallets woke up on November 11 to move a total of 3,500 BTC ($60,6 million) to new addresses. The transaction fee for one of the 500 BTC transactions ($8.7 million) was just 0.00011383 BTC, or $2.00.
Blockchain researcher and developer Kirill Kretov tagged the transactions in a LinkedIn post, noting that the new addresses have not yet been “standardized.”
Each of the seven addresses mentioned had been holding 500 BTC for about 11 years, with all seven receiving the cache on July 10, 2011. All wallets received the amount at the exact same time, 12:22pm UTC, and for each of them, this was first transaction.
Kretov noted that the new wallets have changed the address format from pay-to-public-key-hash (P2PKH) to pay-to-script-hash (P2SH). P2PKH is the most popular type of script for Bitcoin transactions, in which transactions are resolved by sending the public key and a digital signature generated by the corresponding private key.
Unlike P2PKH, the P2SH format allows transactions to be sent to a script hash instead of a public key hash, which requires recipients to provide the script hash and additional data. According to online sources, the recipient may need the signatures of multiple people to spend Bitcoin on a P2SH-formatted address, or a password may be required.
Related: How to Transfer a Billion Dollars for Free Basically: Watching Bitcoin Whales
The awakening of dormant BTC addresses is nothing new to the Bitcoin community. In mid-October, a bitcoin whale moved as much as 32,000 bitcoins for the first time since 2018.
Ki Young Jo, CEO of CryptoQuant, reported that previously, another large BTC investor took out as much as 48,000 bitcoins from Coinbase Pro. A significant portion of Bitcoin transferred has reportedly been dormant since 2011. Last year, Cointelegraph reported a dormant Bitcoin wallet that moved 321 BTC for the first time since 2013.
