10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) Related to Hacked Mt. Gox Exchange Moved After 7 Years of Dormancy: Implications
A huge amount of the king crypto Bitcoin (BTC) that has been dormant for close to a decade, belonging to the crumbled BTC-e exchange wallet, which was linked to the 2014 hacked Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange, has been moved to several unknown recipients and a few exchanges, in different transactions.
Does this recent move call for any concerns? What are the implications? Read along to find out.
Dormant 10,000 BTC On the Move
As Bitcoin and the overall cryptocurrency market struggles to pick up steam to stage a recovery, reports from the blockchain analytic firms, Chainalysis, and several other analytic platforms showed that a sleeping 10,000 units of BTC held in a BTC-e exchange wallet, was awakened on Wednesday, November 23. As aforementioned, these units of Bitcoin have been attributed to BTC-e and the transaction was worth $165 million at the time of execution.
While some BTC were moved by the wallet custodian into the Hitbtc exchange, the majority of the coins were sent to unidentified personal wallets and other sources on Wednesday. Data showed that the 7-year static 10,000 BTC was first sent to two destinations. While 3,500 Bitcoin were transferred to an unknown address, 6500 units of BTC were moved to another destination.
Later, the BTC wallet that had an inflow of 3,500 bitcoin dispatched the assets to many other destinations in different quantities.
Ki Young Ju, the co-founder of the blockchain analytics firm Cryptoquant, verified the report per a Thursday tweet, citing that out of the 10,000 Bitcoin moved, 65 BTC were sent to the HitBTC crypto exchange. The co-founder who also told HitBTC to suspend the associated account for suspicious activity wrote on his Twitter handle saying,
7-year-old 10,000 $BTC moved today. No surprise, it's from criminals, like most of the old Bitcoins. It's the BTC-e exchange wallet related to the 2014 Mt. Gox hack. They sent 65 BTC to Hitbtc a few hours ago, so it's not a gov auction or something.
Brief Background on BTC-e and Mt. Gox
To give a little background, BTC-e was a Russia-centered cryptocurrency exchange that was later closed down by the United States authorities in 2017. The then-popular digital assets marketplace got its servers seized by the FBI, following its involvement in numerous money laundering cases including the hacked Mt. Gox exchange in 2014.
On the other hand, Mt. Gox, the first Bitcoin exchange to ever exist was infiltrated by cyberpunks in 2014 and 744,408 BTC carted away with. This wrecking incident and a huge blow to the crypto industry led to the exchange being permanently closed in 2014.
It bears mentioning that the Wednesday movement of the dormant 10,000 BTC, valued at $165 million at transaction time, marks the largest withdrawal from the BTC-e exchange wallet since April 2018.
Speculations Over the 10K BTC While it is uncertain what the user intends to do with the recently moved 10K BTC, several speculations abound. While some say the user merely changed the location of the assets, some assert that the wallet owner intends to dump all the assets. But why would you dump 10K BTC at $16K?
On the other hand, some people presume that some are likely to have been sold via unofficial over-the-counter (OTC) broker(s). But according to Ki Young Ju, "Old Bitcoin is a bearish thing in most cases."
Amidst all these assumptions, Blockchain.com explorer shows that 6,500 BTC are still intact (unspent) in its new wallet. Meanwhile, 3,500 have been forwarded to many other destinations.
Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading for $16,466 at press time.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
