The owner of the world’s fourth largest bitcoin wallet that has amassed up to 113,000 BTC (worth about $ 435 million) since 2014 has sold all his funds after the withdrawal of the remaining 60,000 BTC ($230 million) at the end of February, according to Trustnode. The withdrawal did not trigger a market crash.
The mysterious bitcoin whale wallet(18rnfoQgGo1HqvVQaAN4QnxjYE7Sez9eca) begins its history on October 24, 2014 when the owner sent 0.001 BTC to the address and three days later withdrew the 1 bitcent from it, according to the block explorer Blockchain. Since that time the bitcoin whale accumulated 113,000 BTC , but most of which was bought throughout much of 2017.
Nevertheless, when the bitcoin price reached its all-time high in December 2017, the wallet owner started moving a large number of coins out of the wallet. Especially, the whale moved a total of 10,000 BTC to an unknown address (bc1qyy30guv) on October 19, 2018 alone, and since that day, no large chunks of bitcoin has been moved into the wallet.
It is noteworthy that on February 28, the remaining funds of 60,000 BTC were transferred to different addresses with about 1,000 BTC for each. Further, some of the withdrawals took place at precisely the same time, so the owner used a software to control the wallet, making it looks more like an over the counter (OTC) sale. Some people speculate that the whale split the 60,000 BTC up to perhaps avoid attention.
The wallet is not owned by a cryptocurrency exchange and it is not clear why the bitcoin whale decided to empty the wallet in the bear market. The wallet owner may have bought these bitcoin at a low price and could still make a lot of money by selling off them during the crypto winter.
However, the withdrawal did not cause the market dip. The blockchain research firm Chainalysis also claimed in a recent webinar that crypto “whales” who own over $56 million in bitcoin pose no serious risk to bitcoin price as different types of “whales” can coordinate their moves.
At the press time, the largest cryptocurrency trades at $3918, up 0.19% over the last 24 hours.