A bitcoin address that had remained inactive since November 2012 has recently engaged in its first transactions in nearly 13 years, as revealed by onchain data. The wallet, which contains a total of 479.69 BTC, is currently valued at over $53 million. Early Thursday morning, the wallet executed five outbound transactions totaling approximately 81.25 BTC, equating to around $9 million.
The address, known as “16fXT,” last made an outgoing transaction on November 13, 2012, when it transferred 4 BTC for a mere $44 at that time, leaving a remaining balance of 398 BTC, valued around $4,400. In the years that followed, this address received an additional 81 BTC but saw little to no activity apart from minor dust transactions.
The recent movements involved transferring funds from the outdated legacy address to more modern “bc1q” native SegWit addresses. Despite these transactions, a substantial portion of the BTC remains unlabelled and has not been transferred further, according to analytics collected by Arkham.
The owner of the wallet, as well as the motivation behind these significant transfers, remains shrouded in mystery. Whale Alert, a service tracking cryptocurrency movements, first flagged the activity, but onchain data provides no further insights into the identity of the entity controlling the address or the reasoning behind the fund transfers.
As it stands, the original wallet still retains approximately 398.44 BTC, valued at about $44.2 million based on current market conditions.
This recent activity is part of a broader trend, highlighting an increase in movements among early bitcoin wallets. In July, Galaxy Digital completed a sale of over 80,000 BTC, valued at more than $9 billion, on behalf of a Satoshi-era investor. Additionally, another early wallet recently shifted billions in assets from bitcoin to ether, piquing market interest.
The bitcoin address in question initially utilized the Pay-to-PubKey-Hash (P2PKH) format, an older style starting with ‘1’. Over the years, bitcoin address formats have evolved to include P2SH addresses (beginning with ‘3’), native SegWit addresses (starting with ‘bc1q’), and the Taproot format (beginning with ‘bc1p’), each bringing enhancements in terms of efficiency and privacy.
