A bitcoin address dormant since November 2012 has transferred funds for the first time in almost 13 years, according to onchain data.
The wallet, holding 479.69 BTC (now valued at over $53 million), initiated five outbound transactions totaling around 81.25 BTC ($9 million) early Thursday morning.
Details of the wallet’s activity
The last recorded outgoing transaction from the so-called “16fXT” legacy address was on November 13, 2012, when 4 BTC (about $44 at the time) were sent, leaving a balance of 398 BTC—valued then at just $4,400.
In the following 18 months, the address received approximately 81 more BTC, with only dust transactions after that period.
The latest transfers moved funds from the legacy address to more modern “bc1q” native SegWit addresses, but most of the BTC remains unlabelled and has not been sent further, according to analytics from Arkham.
Identity and motivation remain unclear
The ownership and motivation behind these large transfers remain unknown.
The wallet’s activity was first flagged by Whale Alert, but onchain data provides no additional clues about the entity behind the address or the reason for the movement.
The original address still holds around 398.44 BTC (about $44.2 million), as per current market prices.
Other recent OG whale activity
There has been an uptick in movement among early bitcoin wallets.
In July, Galaxy Digital sold over 80,000 BTC (worth more than $9 billion) for a Satoshi-era investor, and another OG wallet recently rotated billions from bitcoin into ether.
Such activity, often from early adopters or estate settlements, continues to draw market attention.
The evolution of bitcoin addresses
The dormant wallet used a Pay-to-PubKey-Hash (P2PKH) address, an old bitcoin address format starting with 1.
Over the years, formats evolved to P2SH (starting with 3), native SegWit (bc1q), and Taproot (bc1p), each offering improvements in efficiency or privacy.
