A $720 million sleeping giant has woken up after four years, with $100 million moved to Bitfinex and Binance over the course of ten days at the end of August. The bitcoin wallet contains 111,114 BTC or 0.52% of the total supply. The sudden movement of these dormant funds could have a disruptive potential in the market price action, particularly if the funds belong to one of the two possible likely candidates suggested by Reddit sleuth u/sick_silk.
The Redditor brought the movement of the funds to the attention of the crypto community by publishing a series of posts tracking each transaction in detail accompanied with graphs representing the activity.
The first post was made on 31 August and suggested that the funds may be connected to the now-defunct dark web market Silk Road which handled the trade of billions of dollars worth of contraband such as recreational and prescription drugs, illegal weapons and pornography, malware, hacking services, guides to various types of criminal activity, and other black market goods and services.
u/Sick_Silk points out:
“It seems that the owner of a huge SilkRoad related wallet is moving funds actively since 3 days, dividing it in chunks of 100 coins by subwallets.
The original wallet owned 111,114.62 BTC / BCH , which is currently valuated ~ $844M (without taking in account other #Bitcoin forks).
Last movements on these subwallets are 4 years and 5 months old (March 9th, 2014).
The chunks have been divided over time to 60,000 coins then to 30,000 / 20,000 / 10,000 / 5,000 / 500 and now 100 coins.”
Sick_Silk connected the original address to the Silk Road via the following bitcointalk thread in which user assortmentofsorts connects the dots to from an address operated by DPR (Dread Pirate Roberts AKA Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road) to the one in the Reddit post over the course of six traced transactions.