On-chain data shows a Bitcoin whale with a 4,000 BTC balance has woken up after a 14.3 years long slumber to spend 150 tokens.
Ancient Bitcoin Whale Has Broken A 14.3 Years Long Silence
According to data from cryptocurrency transaction tracker service Whale Alert, a dormant wallet with a massive amount of Bitcoin has just woken up. The address in question contained 4,000 BTC before its transaction on Friday.
Blockchain history shows this wallet collected the 4,000 BTC through mining rewards in 2011, implying the owner was an early miner. Back then, the block subsidy (the reward miners get for adding a new block to the chain) was worth 50 BTC, so it took the miner 80 blocks to assemble the stack.
Today, after four Halving events, the block subsidy has dropped to 3.125 BTC, so a miner could need to mine 1,280 blocks to procure the same amount (though, in practice, it 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 today worth more than $440 million, meaning that the whale was sitting on a profit of a whopping 650,000% when they reactivated the wallet.
The dormancy-breaking Bitcoin transaction involved a sum of 150 BTC ($16.6 million at transfer time), as the details below from Whale Alert show.
Looks like it cost the holder a fee of $0.22 to execute this transaction | Source: Whale Alert
It’s possible that the move may have been to realize some of the profit that the Bitcoin wallet has accumulated over its long life. So far, this 150 BTC transaction is the only withdrawal that the whale has made, so it remains to be seen whether more transfers will follow.
As for who’s behind the transaction, it’s hard to say anything for sure. Usually, wallets that grow this old without spending do so by becoming lost. That is, by having their existence forgotten or keys misplaced.
It could be that the original owner rediscovered the wallet, or someone else obtained its keys, whether by chance or by taking advantage of a vulnerability that the wallet software from that era could possess. Or, in a more unlikely scenario, the miner behind the address could just be a hardcore HODLer.
Speaking of transactions involving dormant coins, this year has seen a record-breaking number of them, as an analyst noted in a CryptoQuant Quicktake post.
How 7+ year old token movements have compared over the years | Source: CryptoQuant
“In 2025, Bitcoin movements of coins dormant for 7+ years have already exceeded 2024 levels, and there are still two months left,” noted the quant. So far, 2025 has seen 270,000 BTC move after being inactive for more than seven years, so by year’s end, the record could grow to 300,000 BTC.
BTC Price
Bitcoin is once again making an attempt at recovery as its price has surged 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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