Cryptocurrency Whale Moved A Record-Breaking $1 Billion Worth Of Bitcoin

06/09/2019

A cryptocurrency whale has moved a 94,504 BTC, worth over one billion dollars.

This huge number made cryptocurrency headlines, as investors and investigators speculated from where the BTC came from and who owns it.

The wallet was first accessed on September 6th, 2019, and has only done five transactions that day, including the massive one billion. Other moves included a $6,644 deposit early on September 6 and a deposit of $6.66 a few hours later.

$1 billion worth of Bitcoins is already a big number. But what makes it even conspicuous was because the sender spent $700 in Bitcoins for network fees (480 Satoshis per byte).

This fee could have been less, because Bitcoin fees can vary depending on how quickly a sender wishes a transaction to be processed by miners.

According to Twitter-based monitoring resource Whale Alert, the transaction did not involve known wallets or those belonging to a specific cryptocurrency-related organization, such as an exchange.

Later, blockchain analysis company TokenAnalyst noticed that many of the transactions came from Huobi wallets.

The movement of such huge sum changed Bitcoin's price from $10,569 to $10,790.

Previously, Bitcoin whales have indeed made similar monstrous moves, but not of this size.

For example, one whale has moved $780 million BTC a week before. Back In May, one whale moved $212 million worth of Bitcoin and paid only $3.93. Two months later, another whale initiated multiple $450 million transactions, and paid only $400.

Large cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms have also sent Bitcoin transactions in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars in the past, also with small fees.

Binance for example back in November 2018, sent $600 million in Bitcoin with a $7 fee.

1B Bitcoin moved
Source: bitinfocharts.com

What makes Bitcoin reliable in terms of transfer, is because it doesn't need permission from any bank, government or financial regulator.

Running on a decentralized network, the cryptocurrency is powered by blockchain, which secures data, making it transparent, but not permutable. This makes transactions immune to any form of governance or state oversight, and at the same time, making the owner of the wallet literally unknown.

On another report, the hash rate of Bitcoin reaches a record high of 100 EH/S.

This is a huge increase since back in August, when the sum of the SHA-256 hash rates between the BCH and BTC networks had a peak of 91 EH/S.

This was a significant, as the network's hash rate has increasingly being generated by next-generation equipment.

A few days earlier, the market capitalization of Bitcoin has reached $190 billion. This was similar to that of PepsiCo, the carbonated soft drink manufacturer.