On-chain data shows that a Bitcoin whale with a balance of 4,000 BTC woke up after a 14.3-year slumber to spend 150 tokens.
Former Bitcoin whale broke 14.3-year silence
According to data from cryptocurrency transaction tracking service Whale Alert, a dormant wallet containing a massive amount of Bitcoin has just awakened. The address in question contained 4,000 BTC before its transaction on Friday.
Blockchain history shows that this wallet collected 4,000 BTC from mining rewards in 2011, implying that the owner was an early miner. At the time, the block subsidy (the reward miners receive for adding a new block to the chain) was worth 50 BTC, so the miner needed 80 blocks to assemble the stack.
Today, after four halving events, the block subsidy has fallen to 3,125 BTC, so a miner might need to mine 1,280 blocks to get the same amount (although in practice this would take fewer blocks due to transaction fees also playing a role now). When the miner received the tokens about 14 years ago, they were worth just $67,724. The same stack is worth over $440 million today, meaning the whale had a whopping 650,000% profit when it reactivated the wallet.
The dormancy-breaking Bitcoin transaction involved a sum of 150 BTC ($16.6 million at the time of transfer), as shown in the details below from Whale Alert.
Looks like it cost the holder a fee of $0.22 to execute this transaction | Source: Whale Alert
It is possible that this decision was made to realize some of the profits accumulated by the Bitcoin wallet over its long lifespan. So far, this 150 BTC transaction is the only withdrawal made by the whale, so it remains to be seen if more transfers will follow.
As for who is behind the transaction, it is difficult to say anything with certainty. Usually, wallets that age this long without spending do so by getting lost. That is to say by having forgotten their existence or by losing their keys.
The original owner may have rediscovered the wallet or someone else may have obtained its keys, either by chance or by taking advantage of a vulnerability that wallet software of that era may have possessed. Or, in a more unlikely scenario, the miner behind the address could simply be a hardcore HODLer.
Speaking of transactions involving dormant coins, this year has seen a record number of them, as one analyst noted in a CryptoQuant Quicktake article.
How 7+ year old token movements have compared over the years | Source: CryptoQuant
“In 2025, Bitcoin movements of coins dormant for more than 7 years have already exceeded 2024 levels, and there are still two months to go,” the quant noted. So far, 270,000 BTC have been moved into 2025 after more than seven years of inactivity. So, by the end of the year, the record could reach 300,000 BTC.
BTC Price
Bitcoin is trying to rally again as its price soared to $111,100.
The trend in the price of the coin over the last five days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image from Dall-E, CryptoQuant.com, whale-alert.io, chart from TradingView.com
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