The sudden awakening of old Bitcoin (BTC) whale wallets may be linked to a hack, according to on-chain analysis by Coinbase director Conor Grogan.
Posting on the social media platform X, Grogan makes several observations about last week’s sudden movement of whale wallets holding $8 billion in BTC after lying dormant for more than 14 years.
Grogan notes that one of the wallets appears to have made a test transaction on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network just hours before the big move happened, suggesting that whoever was responsible for the transfer was trying to go unnoticed.
“There is a small possibility that the $8 billion in BTC that recently woke up were hacked or compromised private keys
I found a single BCH test transaction from one of the BTC whale clusters… followed by the full amount. An hour later, the BTC wallets began to move.
There is a possibility that the owner was testing the private key in a way that wouldn’t get noticed, as BCH isn’t monitored heavily by whale-watching services
What makes me say this is the other BCH wallets have not been touched at all; why wouldn’t they also sweep these?
This is all extreme speculation, but the movements are extremely odd here. I do not think that this is an exchange wallet due to the BCH activity, and given the BTC transfers appear to be all manual.”
Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin. Wallets that held BTC before the 2017 Bitcoin Cash fork may also hold the same amount of BCH.
Grogan appears to be suggesting that the BCH test transfer could have been the hacker’s way of checking whether they had access to the wallet before transferring the massive BTC stack.
The wallets in question first accumulated Bitcoin when BTC was trading at $0.78.
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