Bitcoin Whale from 2013 Transfers 411 BTC Worth $34 Million

A Bitcoin wallet that had been dormant since 2013 transferred all 411.45 BTC to a new address on Sunday – currently about $34 million at a price of approximately $82,600 per coin, according to Arkham Intelligence. When the owner initially received these coins, the entire balance was worth about $54,000.

The majority – 411 BTC – was received by the wallet on September 11, 2013, when Bitcoin was trading around $131. Over the next 13 years, the owner neither bought, sold, nor moved any coins, enduring three halvings, the 2017 boom, the FTX collapse in 2022, and the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024. During this time, the value increased more than 600 times.

The wallet itself was not completely empty: it received dozens of tiny deposits of less than a dollar, some from addresses that Arkham marks as phishing. This is a common "address poisoning" scheme: scammers send trace amounts ("dust") to large wallets hoping the owner will accidentally copy their address from the transaction history during the next transfer. The whale did not fall for it.

At 18:23 UTC on Sunday, the owner sent the entire balance to a new address, paying a fee of 337 satoshis – less than a cent. The funds did not go to an exchange, and the new wallet has not initiated any outgoing transactions yet – indicating maintenance rather than a sell-off. The old wallet used an outdated address format, while the new one uses SegWit (P2WPKH), a modern standard with better security and lower fees. Long-dormant holders often switch to such formats before making significant financial moves.

This is part of a broader wave: a day earlier, two wallets dormant for over ten years moved a total of 417 BTC, and a week earlier, a major whale that had been silent since the pre-COVID crash awoke. The pattern resembles 2025, when isolated mega-whales occasionally woke up. As then, movements of long-dormant coins fuel rumors of potential sales, but most transfers go to new private wallets – a sign of care in storage rather than market dumping.