Bitcoin Whale Moves $377 Million in Coins Held Since March 2020

A $377 million Bitcoin stash finally moves

A Bitcoin wallet that had sat untouched since March 2020 moved its entire holding of 4,581.94 BTC to five new addresses on Oct. 12. The transfer was worth roughly $377 million and confirmed in a single blockchain transaction at about 18:37 UTC.

As of Oct. 13, none of the five receiving addresses has spent or moved any of the coins. It is not clear who controls the wallet or why the coins were moved.

Key details of the transfer

• The four largest recipients each received exactly 1,000 BTC; the fifth received 581.94 BTC.
• The transaction fee was 732 satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, costing about 60 cents.
• Bitcoin was trading around $82,350 when the transfer was confirmed.
• The coins originally arrived on March 3, 2020, when they were worth about $40.5 million.
• The value of the holding has grown roughly 10-fold since arrival.

What happened to the wallet since 2020

The wallet was funded in March 2020 from a larger 5,081.95 BTC balance that was split three ways, with 250 BTC going to each of two other addresses. The timing was significant: the COVID-19 market crash began shortly after, and the stash fell from about $40.5 million to roughly $17.6 million.

The wallet then weathered multiple downturns. Tesla's decision to stop accepting Bitcoin and China's mining ban pushed the value down from an April 2021 peak of about $291 million to roughly $131 million by June 2021. The Terra, Celsius, and FTX collapses in 2022 took the value down to about $71 million, a loss of around $239 million from the November 2021 high.

More recently, a market crash linked to tariff-related shock cut Bitcoin from a record of $124,728 down to $57,735 before recovery. During that dip, the wallet's value fell from about $571.5 million to roughly $265 million.

Dust deposits and an address poisoning attempt

Blockchain data shows the wallet received 22 small, low-value deposits, called dust, between August 2020 and May 2026. These ranged from 546 to 6,953 satoshis each and were each worth less than $6 at current prices. Sixteen of these arrived in batch transactions that paid out to between 87 and 610 addresses at once.

One deposit stands out. On Jan. 28, 2025, an address sent the wallet 600 satoshis from an address that matched the first three and last four characters of the whale's address. This pattern is known as address poisoning, a technique where an attacker creates a look-alike address in hopes that someone copies the wrong address from a transaction history. The look-alike address was funded in a transaction on Nov. 12, 2024, that paid out to 1,401 outputs, and was emptied after the single payment. The whale did not appear to fall for it.

What remains unclear

There is no public information about who controls the wallet, why the coins were moved now, or whether the transfer signals an intention to sell. Analysts have raised concerns that moves like this can precede selling, as holders may feel inclined to cash in significant gains. However, other large dormant wallets have moved in the past without an immediate sale following.

In July 2025, an entity moved 80,000 BTC that had been dormant for 14 years, worth $8.6 billion, the largest daily movement of coins aged 10 years or more at that time. Ten days later, a Satoshi-era wallet sent 40,009 BTC, about $4.7 billion, to Galaxy Digital, which later said it had executed a sale worth roughly $9 billion for a Satoshi-era client. Not every wallet move leads to a sale, but the pattern keeps markets watching.

As of Oct. 13, the original address holds 23,288 satoshis in leftover dust, worth about $19, while the five new addresses hold the full 4,581.94 BTC.

Sources

• Decrypt