Six Bitcoin wallets untouched since 2011, 2012, and 2014 moved a combined 553.59 BTC between August 16 and August 26, worth $40.15 million, according to Galaxy Research. Two of the six carry tags linking them to a New York lawsuit seeking to claim tens of thousands of dormant addresses as abandoned property.
Six long-dormant Bitcoin wallets stirred over a ten-day stretch this month, moving 553.59 BTC worth a combined $40.15 million, Galaxy Research reported. The oldest coins in the batch were bought for pocket change in mid-2011 and are now up more than 800,000% on their original purchase price.
A decade of gains cashed in at once
The first wallet woke on August 16, moving 8.54 BTC that had sat still since June 13, 2011. Those coins cost about $14 apiece and were worth $538,000 when they moved, a 461,981% gain. Two days later, a wallet dormant since August 10, 2012 sent out 212 BTC now worth $13.66 million, a potential 557,640% return on a roughly $12 basis. The most recent wallet, dormant since May 28, 2012, moved 40 BTC to Boerse Stuttgart Digital, a German crypto custody bank, for the batch's largest gain at 1,535,911%.
A lawsuit may explain some of the wakeups
Two of the six wallets carry "Salomon Client Dusted" tags, according to Galaxy Research, tying them to Noah Doe, a pseudonymous plaintiff suing in New York Supreme Court to have 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses declared abandoned property. Plaintiffs served notice by sending thousands of wallets a tiny on-chain "dust" transaction carrying a message, and a judge paused a default judgment in the case in early June. Since then, named addresses have been waking up on a regular basis.
A second, unrelated factor may also be at play. In the days around the Coldcard hardware wallet exploit, roughly 233,000 BTC left long-term holder wallets as owners of Coldcard, Ledger, and Trezor devices moved funds to safer setups, even though most of that supply was never at risk.
Neither theory accounts for all six wallets in this batch. None of the six destination addresses has been linked to an exchange except the one that landed at Boerse Stuttgart Digital, so the other five could remain in cold storage or be one step from a sale.
Source: Decrypt
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