After tapping a 24-hour high at $42,592 per unit, the price of bitcoin lost the gains it gathered on Wednesday, sliding more than 5% during Thursday morning’s trading sessions. Meanwhile, as crypto prices fluctuated, an odd bitcoin transaction from 2010 was transferred at 1:45 a.m. (UTC) moving 429 bitcoin worth $16.8 million.
Large sum of ‘Sleeping Bitcoin’ transferred after more than 11 years of sleep
Crypto prices have been fragile over the past few days amid the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and heightened pessimism towards the future of the global economy. After falling into the $38,300 range two days ago, bitcoin’s price rebounded on Wednesday, hitting a high of $42,592 per unit.
However, the bullish sentiment did not last too long and BTC’s value moved back into the $38K territory on Thursday. While the market has been volatile, an old-school whale from 2010 decided to transfer a large sum of bitcoins.
The transfer, originating from bitcoin address “17QBW”, was approximately 489,091 BTC. The large transaction was captured by blockchain parser Btcparser.com when it was processed at block height 726,641 at 01:45 (UTC) on March 10.
The 429 BTC worth $16.8 million originally derived from a transaction processed 11 years and four months ago, on October 28, 2010. The transaction derived from a sender that held 1,000 bitcoin that were moved from one address to another address on October 20, 2010.
The original address where the 1,000 BTC came from processed a number (5,111 bitcoins) of BTC between September 6, 2010 and July 12, 2011. The 429 BTC spent on March 10, 2022 was originally obtained in same time as the remaining 510.91 BTC. was sent to bitcoin address “1NS7i”. While the owner waited over a decade to transfer the 429 BTC, the 510.91 BTC was spent two days later on Halloween (October 31, 2010) that year.
There hasn’t been a major awakening of 2010 bitcoins like the 429 BTC transaction in a long while. Bitcoin.com News has been investigating a mega bitcoin whale that has spent tens of thousands of so-called ‘sleeping bitcoins’ and the last time we saw the mega whale was on November 10, 2021. On that day, BTC reached a lifetime price high at $69K per unit and that specific mega whale moved 1,000 decade-old bitcoins.
While the 429 BTC is not as large as the aforementioned mega-whale transfer, it is much larger than the typical old-school block grant transfers that happen to be one or maybe two blocks. A visual perspective of outgoing transactions originating from the address “17QBW” shows the possibility that some of the coins processed at 726,641 were sent to the Coinbase trading platform.
A number of other transactions show fractions of the coins were moved to unknown addresses, none of which were Segwit-based (Bech32) as the two largest outputs were sent to legacy addresses.
