A bitcoin wallet that contains 791 BTC ($25.7 million at a current market price of $32,500) and that has not been active for almost 10 years just got activated.
This was made known through a popular blockchain tracker, Whale Alert, which tweets about significant movement in wallet activity on different Blockchain networks. The sleeping Bitcoin address in question was activated after 9.1 years of silence. According to Whale Alert, 640 of these bitcoins, worth over $20.8 million, was recently withdrawn from the account.
READ: Satoshi Nakamoto’s unspent BTCs worth $10.9 billion
The wallet is termed in the cryptocurrency community as a “Satoshi-Era” wallet because it was created back in June of 2012, almost 14 months after the creator of the Bitcoin blockchain and creator of the first cryptocurrency, who is unknown to the world but goes by the alias, Satoshi Nakamoto, vanished from the internet. The legendary Bitcoin creator shared his final emails on April 26th, 2011, before he went completely offline.
The recent awakening of the Satoshi-era Bitcoin wallet is not the only one to have occurred this year. Back in March, Whale Alert reported the “resurrection” of another Satoshi-era BTC wallet. 5000 bitcoins were transferred from the wallet, which had previously been inactive for more than 7 years. A similar move to this recent one was noted at the end of February 2021, when 2189 BTC, worth over $105 million at the time, were transferred from the sleeping wallet.
READ: London wealth manager cashes out $1 billion profit from Bitcoin Investment
What this means
This indicates that Bitcoin early adopters are cashing in on their investment made into the asset class. As of June 2012, Bitcoin was trading $5.27 which means the owner of the wallet got all 791 Bitcoin for $4,168.57. This represents a 616,418% return on investment in 9.1 years.
No asset class has given this level of return in almost 10 years. A lot of people believe Bitcoin is just getting started as many have predicted the asset class to go as high as $500,000 for 1 BTC by 2025. Although this is all speculation, the Bitcoin network has truly helped to revolutionize the world of financing and banking as we know it.
READ: South Africa moves to regulate cryptocurrencies
Although there is not enough sufficient evidence to link these peculiar dormant transactions to Satoshi Nakamoto but if it is him withdrawing dormant Bitcoins from the past, it might just be the most romantic material version of the sleeping beauty.