About 94,506 BTC coins moved on the morning of September 6th from multiple Bitcoin addresses to a single wallet have become the subject of speculation over who could be the individual or organization behind the now fifth-largest holder of bitcoin.
According to data from monitoring resource Bitinfocharts, the receiving address now holds about 0.5% of the total bitcoin in circulation, an amount that is worth about $982 million as of press time.
Most of the sending addresses are unknown as well making this the largest transfer of bitcoin to an unknown wallet.
Bitinfocharts shows that most of the leading bitcoin addresses with the most bitcoins stored belong to cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, whose cold wallet holds 164,282 BTC and stands among the leading wallets.
Huobi, Bittrex, and Bitstamp hold the other top four wallets while the fifth spot, which was held by another anonymous entity was shoved back one spot after the Friday morning transaction.
The transaction cost the senders about $700 in bitcoin network transaction fee, which a hefty sum is considering that almost similarly large sums have been sent in the recent past with fees as low as $4.
UK-based blockchain analyst TokenAnalyst has reported that as many as a third of the sending addresses belong to Huobi, the popular cryptocurrency exchange based in Malta.
Glassnode, another blockchain data, and analytics company seemed to confirm the same saying that at least 73,000 BTC of the 94.5K BTC (~77%) originated from Huobi. In addition, Crypto Herpes Cat, a pseudonymous Twitter user also linked at least two of the sending addresses to Huobi.
This information has not been confirmed by Huobi as of press time but it seems safe to conclude that some of the bitcoin did originate from the exchange.
The owner of the wallet, is, however, another mystery altogether. There is also speculation that the bitcoin could be part of the Chinese Ponzi scheme PlusToken, whose promoters are moving coins to a ‘safe’ wallet outside the exchange.
Another speculative proposal is that the receiving address could be linked to Bakkt, the bitcoin futures platform owned by the NYSE parent company ICE. Bakkt launched its bitcoin custody Bakkt Warehouse on Thursday, less than 24 hours before the transaction was done.
The receiving address could be owned by a single individual, or an exchange or an institutional entity, we may never know and maybe that’s the beauty of blockchain. The senders did not need permission from any authority to make the transfers, nor did they have to reveal their identity to anyone. (Or maybe they did.)
Whatever the case may be, this latest transaction continues a trend that is picking up pace recently where several whales are moving their bitcoin holdings for one reason or another.
