Early Whales of Bitcoin and Ethereum Suddenly Resume Activities | coindesk JAPAN

A wallet holding a large amount of Bitcoin (BTC), which has been dormant for several years, suddenly comes back to life. There is a debate on crypto-twitter about why.

A colloquial term used in the cryptocurrency industry, “whales” refers to those who hold large amounts of a given token. Due to their large holdings, whales are able to influence token prices and sentiment.

One such wallet last active in 2012 moved more than 400 BTC (about $11 million) over the weekend, data shows. This Bitcoin whale moved 360 BTC to one wallet and 40 BTC to another. This whale bought around 900 BTC in 2012 and has held onto that asset ever since, earning around 40000% return on its initial investment.

The move comes after several other whales moved large amounts of Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) over the past few weeks.

Another whale wallet, inactive for over a decade, moved 279 BTC in early April. The whale received 1,128 BTC in 2012-2013, when the price fluctuated between $12 and $195, and has $31 million in assets at the time of writing. evaluated.

Ethereum owners are also moving their tokens around.Last week, a participant in an Ethereum Initial Coin Offering (ICO) took money from a wallet that had been inactive for eight years.Moved 1ETH to another wallet. This wallet holds 2,356 ethers (valued at over $4 million, about 536 million yen) purchased at 31 cents each at the ICO.

The identities of these whales are unknown, and none of them used on-chain messages to communicate the reason for their migration.

The silence has spurred speculation on crypto-twitter that the developers of the dark website Silk Road had access to their wallets, or that an insider in the know moved the tokens ahead of the bad news. I’m wearing

Others speculate that the wallet password was cracked.

Adam Cochrane, a partner at CEHV, tweeted: “Where 10+ year old wallets suddenly come to life with multiple assets. These wallets have something to do with Mt Gox cold storage. If there isn’t, the old wallet generator must have been cracked.”

Old wallets have been repeatedly targeted by hackers and online thieves, so Cochrane’s reasoning may not be entirely off the mark.

Earlier this month, Taylor Monahan, the founder of ethereum wallet management tool MyCrypto, pointed out a large-scale “wallet exfiltration operation” that could affect whales and early ethereum holders.

For the past 48hrs I’ve been unwinding a massive wallet draining operation

I don’t know how big it is but since Dec 2022 it’s drained 5000+ ETH and ??? in tokens / NFTs / coins across 11+ chains.

Its rekt my friends & OGs who are reasonably secure.

No one knows how. pic.twitter.com/MafntG7RkP

— Tay (@tayvano_) April 18, 2023

Monaghan estimates that more than 5,000 ETH was exfiltrated from such wallets by this sophisticated attack. “My guess is that someone has a large cache of data that is over a year old and is deliberately extracting the keys while parsing the keys from this treasure trove,” she said. I was tweeting at the time.

Such security concerns may have prompted the recent move of Bitcoin to whale wallets. But that’s just speculation for now.

｜Translation: coindesk JAPAN
｜Editing: Toshihiko Inoue
｜Image: Shutterstock
｜Original: Bitcoin Whales Spook Crypto Twitter With Sudden Wallet Movements