[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee (이윤서)] An unidentified entity sent 107 bitcoin it had held for more than 12 years to a burn address, making the coins permanently unusable.

Cointelegraph reported on May 28 that the burned amount was worth $8.5 million at prices at the time.

On-chain data showed that on May 26, five bitcoin addresses moved a total of 107 BTC to an old burn address starting with “11111”. Bitcoin sent to that address is effectively unrecoverable because the private key is not known. As a result, the cumulative amount of bitcoin sent to that address rose to 807 BTC, with an Arkham value of $59 million, or about 88.3 billion won.

The transfer is drawing attention because of the holding period and the size of the price gain. Most of the burned bitcoin is believed to have been bought about 12 years ago, when bitcoin traded below $600. TradingView data showed bitcoin has risen 127,000 percent since then, making it a relatively large bitcoin burn among cases reported in 2026.

Bitcoin does not have a built-in, network-level burn function like ethereum or Binance Coin (BNB). Sending coins to an unrecoverable address is effectively the only way to eliminate circulating supply. The transaction remains on the blockchain, but funds cannot be recovered without the private key. The address has also been used for “proof-of-burn”, including when Stacks burned 40 BTC in September 2015 to register a namespace.

Various theories are emerging about why the bitcoin was burned. Galaxy Research viewed the 107 BTC burn as possibly intended for tax-loss purposes, and also as a possible step to eliminate funds from illegal activity. It said no clear link to prior hacking or cyberattacks had been confirmed. Another possibility raised was that an artificial intelligence (AI) agent sent the coins to the wrong address.

Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas mentioned the possibilities of an AI agent, kidnapping and tax-related motives, while Coinbase Chief Product Officer Conor Grogan said, “The most likely possibility is that an exchange mishandled a cold-wallet transfer.”

The market is focusing less on the burned amount itself than on who carried out the transaction and why. With a large amount of long-held bitcoin permanently burned without any prior signs, multiple possibilities are being raised at once, from an internal exchange transfer incident to tax-related processing and the cleanup of illicit funds. No decisive clues have emerged so far to identify the source of the funds or the actual intent.

The case again showed that bitcoin can be effectively destroyed permanently through its address structure even without a built-in burn function. At the same time, with the background unconfirmed despite a large amount disappearing, it also exposed the limits and interpretive scope of on-chain tracking.

1111111111111111111114oLvT2 corresponds to Hash160 = 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (twenty zero bytes). Base58Check-encode that with the P2PKH version byte and you get this address. Because finding a public key whose Hash160 is all zeros would require either… pic.twitter.com/WAii2UbQ0U