A bitcoin wallet that has held 4,581.94 BTC since March 2020 moved all of its holdings on Oct. 12, local time, to five new addresses.

Blockchain media outlet Decrypt reported on Oct. 13 that the transfer was worth about $377 million and the fee was 732 satoshis.

The transaction was confirmed at block height 971126, when bitcoin was priced at about $82,350. Four of the five receiving addresses each got 1,000 BTC, and the remaining one received 581.94 BTC. As of Oct. 13, no additional fund movements were confirmed from these addresses. The wallet's actual owner and the purpose of the transfer were also not known.

The wallet received 4,581.95 BTC on March 3, 2020 in a transaction that split 5,081.95 BTC into three addresses. At the time, bitcoin was priced at about $8,830, valuing the inflow at about $40.5 million. The value of the amount moved this time is about 9.3 times that level.

The wallet held funds over a long period and went through several sharp sell-offs. Shortly after the bitcoin flowed in, the value of the holding fell from about $40.5 million to about $17.6 million due to the COVID-19 shock. In May 2021, Tesla's suspension of bitcoin payments and China's crackdown on mining overlapped, pushing the valuation down to about $131 million in June from about $291 million in April that year.

In 2022, the collapses of Terra, Celsius and FTX followed one after another, and the wallet's valuation also fell to about $71 million. More recently, as bitcoin fell about 54 percent from an all-time high (ATH) of $124,728 recorded in October last year to $57,735, the value of the holding also dropped from $571.5 million to about $265 million.

During the holding period, small 'dust' deposits were also confirmed, in which tiny amounts of cryptocurrency are sent from outside. On-chain data showed 22 dust transfers into the wallet from August 2020 to May 2026. The amounts per transfer were 546 to 6,953 satoshis, and at current prices most are worth less than $6. Of these, 16 came from batch transfers that sent small amounts to 87 to 610 addresses at once.

In particular, on Jan. 28, 2025, 600 satoshis were deposited from a similar address whose first three and last four characters matched those of the whale wallet. It was a point suspected of being an 'address poisoning' tactic that induces users to copy a similar address incorrectly from their transaction history. The sending address received bitcoin in a transaction on Nov. 12, 2024 that split funds into 1,401 outputs, then sent one transfer to the whale wallet and exhausted its balance. The remaining sending addresses were bc1 addresses with a different form from the whale wallet.

There have been previous cases in which large amounts of bitcoin moved from long-dormant wallets. In July 2025, 80,000 bitcoin that had not moved for 14 years was transferred, valued at about $8.6 billion at the time. Ten days later, 40,009 BTC from a so-called Satoshi-era wallet was sent to Galaxy. Galaxy later said it executed sales worth about $9 billion on behalf of clients who had held bitcoin since the Satoshi era.

The original wallet now has only 23,288 satoshis of remaining dust worth about $19. The five new addresses that received the funds still hold the 4,581.94 BTC as is. The movement of the long-held amount has been confirmed, but it has not yet been confirmed whether it will be followed by deposits to exchanges or sales.