Dormant Bitcoin (BTC) Addresses Wake Up, Unusually Move $2B On-Chain

A new horde of Bitcoin (BTC) whale addresses are back to life, transferring about $2 billion on-chain.

The re-emergence of the market whales was first spotted by renowned crypto analytics firm Arkham Intelligence. The data platform showed 5 different wallets consolidating almost 50,000 BTC in 4 distinct wallet addresses.

The break in dormancy for these wallet addresses comes when the crypto ecosystem is preparing for a mega shift in liquidity born out of the emergence of spot Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) products.

While there are no direct connections between these wallet reawakening and the spot BTC ETF products, the coincidence has sparked an intriguing wave of thesis on why they have awoken now.

The Addresses Activity

According to the Arkham Intelligence insight, all of the transfers made from the 5 wallet addresses were initiated at the same time.

Despite the differences in the wallet tags, these simultaneous transfers and the historic trend from these wallets show the entities behind are closely related.

$2 BILLION of dormant Bitcoin moved just before US market open today, across several linked addresses.

The BTC had moved once in 2019, and before that had been dormant since 2013. pic.twitter.com/xD4frjzQuP

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) January 16, 2024

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The largest of these transfers came from address “33adD” where a total of 11.15K worth $478.15  million.

Besides this, a 10.486K Bitcoin worth about $450.26 million was moved from the “3BK5T” address; a separate 9.952K Bitcoin was transferred out of the address labeled “31z8K”.

The last 2 transactions featured 8.859K BTC and 9.445K BTC moved from “3Fs3V” and “3KNWi” respectively.

The address activity showed that the last time Bitcoin moved from the addresses was in 2019 and prior to then, it went dormant in 2013 as well, creating a rare Satoshi-like disappearance move.

Just as observed, the transfers were always initiated at almost the same time. Notably, the whale consolidated the huge funds into five addresses from a total of 49, according to Arkham Intelligence.

Bitcoin Price Impact

While market experts ponder on the core motivation behind the massive Bitcoin transfers, it is worth noting that investors in the market are still not pricing in the funds at the moment. 

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price and market capitalization were pegged at $42,701.70 and $837,471,493,019, down by a marginal loss of 0.8%. However, the trading volume of the coin has managed to soar by 18% to $24,803,692,001.

Amid the gloom, there is a projection of recovery for Bitcoin price and the actions of dormant whales might not impact this forecast negatively. In addition, a CryptoQuant author asserted that these were mere wallet rebalancing moves.