A Bitcoin whale wallet with a 14-year history has just sold off its coins in one of the biggest BTC transactions in history.
In a press release, the crypto financial services giant Galaxy Digital says that it facilitated the successful execution of “one of the largest notional bitcoin transactions in the history of crypto” on behalf of one of the firm’s clients.
-->Galaxy says the transaction involved Bitcoin worth about $9.3 billion at current prices.
Says Galaxy,
“Galaxy completed the sale of more than 80,000 bitcoin – valued at over $9 billion based on current market prices – for a Satoshi-era investor, representing one of the earliest and most significant exits from the digital asset market. The transaction was part of the investor’s broader estate planning strategy.”
In a post on the social media platform X, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju says that the entity that sold its coins had a wallet that originated from MyBitcoin, one of the earliest Bitcoin exchange and wallet services. In 2011, MyBitcoin suddenly shut down and explained that it had been hacked.
The exchange only reimbursed its customers for 49 of their losses, suggesting that the rest was lost to the hack.
Says Ju,
“The recent transfer of 80,000 BTC, dormant for 14 years, came from wallets originally hosted by MyBitcoin.
The wallets had been inactive since April 2011, before MyBitcoin collapsed in a hack that July. It likely belongs to the hacker or the anonymous founder known as Tom Williams.
It seems Galaxy Digital bought the Bitcoin from them, but I’m not sure if they did any forensics.”
At the time of the hack, BTC was trading for around $13 a coin, meaning that the whale saw roughly a 922,976 return on its investment if sold around the $120,000 mark.
