From $4,400 to $53 million: Dormant bitcoin wallet wakes up for first time in nearly 13 years

A dormant bitcoin wallet address containing 479.69 BTC ($53.2 million) transferred funds for the first time in nearly 13 years on Thursday morning, according to onchain data.

Five outbound sends, totaling around 81.25 BTC ($9 million), were initiated from 2:36 a.m. to 9:29 a.m. UTC, data from blockchain explorer Mempool shows.

The address last sent 4 BTC (approximately $44 at the time) on Nov. 13, 2012, when its approximate 398 BTC balance at the time was worth just $4,400, onchain monitoring platform Whale Alert first noted on X. However, it continued to receive around 81 BTC over the next 18 months — almost matching Thursday's outbound total, with only dust transactions thereafter.

Each of the transactions moved funds from the legacy "16fXT" address to more modern "bc1q" native SegWit addresses. Aside from two small, potentially test transactions, the bulk of the funds have not been transferred further so far, and remain unlabelled, according to the onchain analytics platform Arkham . Therefore, the reason for the transfers remains unknown, as does the identity of the wallet's ownership.

Starting with a 1, legacy Pay-to-PubKey-Hash (P2PKH) addresses are the oldest style of bitcoin addresses. After that came Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) addresses starting with 3, then native SegWit (P2WPKH) addresses starting with bc1q, and finally Taproot (P2TR) addresses starting with bc1p — the most up-to-date format.

With bitcoin currently trading for around $111,000, according to The Block’s BTC price page , the value of the bitcoin the address transferred has risen more than 10,000 times since funds were last moved out of the wallet in 2012.

The original "16fXT" address still holds around 398.44 BTC, worth around $44.2 million, onchain data shows.

Increased bitcoin OG whale movements

OG bitcoin wallets have ramped up their activity in recent months as the foremost cryptocurrency continued to make new all-time highs.

In July, Galaxy Digital sold off more than 80,000 BTC , valued at over $9 billion at the time, for a Satoshi-era investor related to the client's estate planning requirements, though the large, relatively fast sale was absorbed by the market well. The funds were moved for the first time in 14 years ahead of the sale.

More recently, a bitcoin OG continued to ramp up a significant rotation from BTC to ETH this month. The wallet, which initially held over $5 billion in bitcoin, has amassed nearly $4 billion in ether so far.