news.bitcoin.com
On Wednesday afternoon, at block height 907849, a long-silent bitcoin stash finally stirred. The holder, who scooped up 500 BTC between June 10 and July 31, 2017, moved the coins for the first time in nearly eight years.
From $1.3M to $58M: Dormant Bitcoin Awakens in Synchronized Transfers
The date is July 30 on a typical Wednesday afternoon, but the move was anything but ordinary. Fifty wallets—each created between June 10 and July 31, 2017—shifted a hefty haul of bitcoin ( BTC) in unison, according to metrics parsed by btcparser.com.
The anonymous whale dispatched exactly 10 BTC from each address, totaling 500.01148 BTC. At the time these coins were originally acquired, bitcoin floated between $2,500 and $2,650 apiece. That places their 2017 value at $1.32 million.
Fast forward to today, with BTC prices on the low end fetching $116,404 per coin, and that same batch now holds a jaw-dropping $58.2 million. Of the total, 400 BTC flowed into a brand new Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) address from 40 legacy Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) wallets.
The remaining 100 BTC was directed to a second, also new and unidentified, P2WPKH wallet. Blockchair’s privacy meter slapped most of these transfers with a score of 3 out of 100—classified as “critical.” The reasons? Matching inputs and outputs, address reuse, and complete wallet sweeps.
This 500 BTC awakening joins a streak of historic movements throughout July. Our newsdesk has tracked billions in sleeping coins shaking off the dust over the past year, and July now ranks as the busiest month yet for dormant bitcoin activity.