World’s largest Bitcoin wallet transfers funds of $1bn

The wallet transferred its contents to two recipients, with the second recipient becoming the world’s second-richest wallet in existence

The world’s largest unattributed Bitcoin wallet has transferred over $1 billion in cryptocurrency.

The transaction sent 101,857 BTC that had a market value of approximately $933 million, at the time of writing, to two recipients. The first received 5,000 BTC ($45.8 million) and the second received 96,857 BTC ($887.4 million).

This transfer made the second Bitcoin wallet the second richest in the world, second only to a cold storage wallet owned by the cryptocurrency exchange, Huobi.

An automated tracking service registered this transaction on June 27. It cost only $0.48 in associated fees.

The sending wallet was created with a transfer of similar magnitude on April 1. It was then logged as one of the wealthiest Bitcoin addresses that were not owned by high profile exchanges, since the bitcoin stock of these entities is owned primarily by their clients.

The person or group behind the wallet remains a mystery due to the anonymised nature of Bitcoin transactions; however, some crypto enthusiasts theorise that it may have been owned by large scale investors such as the Winklevoss twins.

In addition, it is unclear whether all the Bitcoin that was stored in the wallet belonged to a single individual, a group of individuals, or perhaps an exchange that had not announced its affiliation with the address.

Conversely, the identity of the recipients in this transaction also remains unknown. There are speculations that the sending and receiving wallets may be owned by the same entity; however, it is unclear as to why that person or group would have needed to shift the location of their funds.

Massive fund transfers are a common sight in the crypto industry. In June, a crypto tracking Twitter bot recorded a Bitcoin whale sending 241,500 BTC (around $2.2 billion)  in seven successive transactions in the span of one hour.

Each transaction was made separately to unknown wallets and contained between 27,000 and 40,000 BTC. Altogether, six wallets were involved in the transaction, as some sending and receiving wallet addresses were used more than once.

The costs of the transactions overall amounted to 0.0007 BT ($6.51).

Bitcoin whales refer to large holders who have at least 1,000 BTC (more than $9 million in crypto). According to Glassnode, a market intelligence firm, the number of Bitcoin whales is increasing; a first since the year 2016. There are now around 1,800 Bitcoin whales in existence.