New Wallet Builds Huge Bitcoin Holding

There's a new whale in town.

In the space of just a few weeks between the middle of May and the end of June, a wallet with no prior activity started to accumulate bitcoins. By the time the owner had made their last transfer in, a sum of 6,600 BTC on June 28, the wallet held 118,300 BTC, worth a little over $3 billion at today's prices. The falling value of BTC means the holder is currently around $90 million in the red.

Third-Largest Holder

It's unclear who this enormous whale is. It has not been confirmed as an exchange wallet, the only accounts that generally hold so much crypto—though it's possible it can be attributed to an exchange quietly moving cold storage coins around, for reasons unknown.

The colossal amount of coins means that bc1ql49ydapnjafl5t2cp9zqpjwe6pdgmxy98859v2 is now the third largest wallet in existence, and the single largest non-exchange wallet (one of Binance's cold wallets is #1 with 248,597 BTC, followed by Bitfinex with 178,010 BTC).

There's plenty of speculation on Twitter about who the whale could be, with one party that appeals to the community's love of intrigue.

Having announced its intention to launch an ETF, the theory is that BlackRock then started frontrunning its approval. Other ideas include MicroStrategy and, of course, other financial institutions who have fingers in the crypto pie. After all, when a spot ETF finally launches, these organizations will need BTC to back it, and it makes sense to buy in advance rather than be forced to chase the price as it's pushed up by a wave of new money.

A little more digging suggests that the transfers came from Gemini. Does that simply mean the US exchange is updating its cold storage, or that the whale used the well-regulated platform to make a series of multi-million-dollar purchases?

No doubt more information will come to light in the near future. In the transparent world of the blockchain, it's hard to keep too many secrets for long. But for now, the crypto community is happy to fill the vacuum with conspiracy theories.

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