A total of 1,214.42 BTC, valued at about $86m, has moved from bitcoin wallets first identified in 2014, after remaining inactive for more than a decade.
The transfers were part of a wider movement involving 1,314.41 BTC, worth approximately $94.03m, over a 24-hour period as bitcoin reached a weekly high of $72,400.
Data from btcparser.com showed that 28 long-dormant wallets became active between 19 and 20 August. More than 92% of the bitcoin involved came from addresses first created in 2014, with 21 of the 28 transactions moving exactly 50 BTC at a time.
The activity is not linked to the nearly 2,000 BTC stolen earlier in August from hardware wallets affected by faulty Coldcard firmware. Instead, the movements appear more likely to have been made by long-term holders transferring coins to newer or more secure addresses.
However, the public nature of the Bitcoin blockchain does not reveal why the transactions were made.
Transfers made into newer wallets
The coins were moved from legacy P2PKH, or Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash, wallets into P2WPKH, or Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash, addresses.
Several of the transactions were included in the same blocks, including block 963203. That pattern suggests the movements may have been coordinated rather than occurring independently.
The new destination addresses have not been flagged by blockchain monitoring services such as Arkham Intelligence. There is also no clear indication that the bitcoin has been sent to a cryptocurrency exchange.
Blockchair.com’s privacy tool rated several of the 21 transfers involving 50 BTC as “low”, giving them a score of 22 out of 100. The assessment was based on about four privacy-related issues, including the repeated use of the same address among transaction inputs.
The transfers appear to have involved one large holder, or possibly two, but other wallets from the same 2014 period were also reactivated.
On Thursday, a separate wallet first identified on 26 December 2014 moved 150 BTC, worth $10.73m at current exchange rates. Those coins were also transferred from a legacy P2PKH address to a new, unflagged P2WPKH wallet.
Alongside the 1,214.42 BTC from 2014 wallets, blockchain analysts identified three wallets created in 2016 that moved 79.99 BTC. Two addresses first seen in 2017 transferred a further 20 BTC during the same period.
Significant gains for early holders
The owners of the 2014 wallets bought or received their bitcoin during one of the cryptocurrency’s earliest major bear markets. Bitcoin traded at between about $310 and $427 in November and December 2014 before falling to roughly $152-$170 by the middle of January 2015.
Even using the upper end of the 2014 trading range as a reference, the bitcoin moved this week represented a gain of at least 16,645% by Thursday.
August has already become a notable month for dormant bitcoin activity. It began with the Coldcard incident, in which almost 2,000 BTC were stolen from hardware wallets running defective firmware.
As that stolen-funds investigation continued, other long-inactive holdings also began moving. The latest transactions included a relic from 2012, which joined the wider wave of dormant bitcoin becoming active after the Coldcard exploit.
