2023-08-25 16:11:18
It is not uncommon for the activity of a bitcoin whale to attract the interest of the crypto community. In the last couple of months, a new giga-BTC wallet has grown out of nowhere, which according to blockchain data holds the third largest bitcoin wealth, and speculations regarding the owner have not ceased even now. We call those big bitcoin owners who can even start movements that define the entire market with one transaction as whales. Since all wallets and all transactions on the blockchain are public, there are special X (Twitter) accounts specialized in “whale hunting”, and major movements are also covered by the press. This is how it happened now, as a Bitcoin wallet has collected a total of $3 billion worth of BTC since the beginning of May: This unknown address has accumulated over $3 Billion worth of #Bitcoin in the last 3 months. The prime suspect? The first major transaction of 3400 BTC occurred on May 16th 2023. Almost exactly 1 month later on June 15th 2023, BlackRock filed for it’s spot #Bitcoin ETF. pic.twitter.com/TdFuUkELuH — DivXMaN (@crypto_div) August 21, 2023 The mystery user’s wallet has been active since May 8, when he first transferred 0.25 BTC (regarding $6,860 at the time) to himself, and then more was followed by the accumulation of more than 118,300 BTC (regarding $3.13 billion in current value). This is such an outstanding amount that, according to the BitInfoCharts list, only the cold wallets of Binance and Bitfinex have larger bitcoin balances. In the beginning, the number one “suspect” regarding the identity of the owner was BlackRock, because the wallet became active barely a month following the fund manager announced to the SEC its intention to create a spot BTC ETF. Such an ETF requires a significant amount of bitcoin collateral, and the company is apparently looking to collect the assets at a good rate before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gives formal approval to create a bitcoin ETF. By the way, the wallet mainly received transactions from the Gemini and Robinhood crypto exchanges, which in practice would either mean that the purchases were made on the said exchanges and a third party takes its assets from there to a cold wallet, or one of the two exchanges moves bitcoins for technical reasons to a new portfolio. According to the Arkham Intelligence blockchain analysis platform, the latter is true, as Robinhood owns the wallet in question, and the platform has the designation “Robinhood: Jump Trading Custody”. Examining the blockchain data, it seems that Arkham Intelligence may indeed be right, and Robinhood is certainly moving BTC to a new, even more secure wallet following vulnerability concerns arose in early August regarding wallets generated with the MPC algorithm. By the way, Robinhood is an institutional partner of BlackRock, so it cannot be ruled out that a part of the BTC stored in its wallet really belongs to BlackRock, but from a strictly technical point of view, it seems most likely that there is only a technical migration taking place before our eyes.
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