A Bitcoin whale has abruptly emptied its BTC wallet with nearly $500 million worth of the cryptocurrency in it, as its price moves closer to a new all-time high.
As first reported by Daily Hodl, a large 8,648 BTC transaction, worth nearly $500 million, was first detected by large transaction monitoring service BTC Block Bot and published on social media. The transaction cost a little over $50 and completely drained what was once the 114th largest bitcoin wallet.
Whale alert! 🐋 Someone moved 8,684 BTC ($498M) in block 674,185 https://t.co/dzLgvCU3gH
— Bitcoin Block Bot (@BtcBlockBot) March 11, 2021
The bitcoin whale moved its funds into two separate wallets, with one receiving 4,000 BTC and the other receiving 4,684 BTC. None of the addresses involved in these transactions appear to be associated with cryptocurrency trading platforms or other services.
This means that the whale isn’t likely moving its funds to sell them on the market and increase selling pressure, and may instead be moving them for an over-the-counter (OTC) deal, or to improve their own security by moving funds while in cold storage.
It’s worth noting this is far from the largest BTC transactions ever recorded. Just this month, as CryptoGlobe reported, a bitcoin whale moved a massive $4.5 billion in BTC during a sell-off that saw the price of the cryptocurrency move from $55,000 to a $43,000 low.
Since then the price of bitcoin recovered to retest the $58,000 mark and is currently trading at $57,000 after failing to break its all-time high. The $4.5 billion transactions, it’s worth noting, were made by cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and as such could be part of a routine security procedure.
Data shows whales have been accumulating more and more BTC over the last few weeks, to the point the CEO of a cryptocurrency analytics platform said that it was unlikely for the price of the cryptocurrency to drop below $44,000 during the sell-off.
