Whale alert! Suspected Huobi wallet moves $6 billion in Bitcoin
The fifth-largest Bitcoin holding address, referred to as “37X,” transferred more than $6 billion worth of Bitcoin to three new addresses on March 23. The whale moved nearly all of its 94,500 Bitcoin, leaving just 1.4 BTC in the original address, for the first time since 2019, according to Arkham Intelligence.
The transferred coins were distributed as follows: $5.03 billion worth of Bitcoin to the address starting with bc1q8yj, and the remaining to addresses bc1q6m5 and bc1q592, receiving $561.46 million and $488.40 million in Bitcoin, respectively. The bc1q592 address has already forwarded those funds.
“That’s a long time to not reconfigure/move around your customer’s cold storage… most of the time there’s some indication of exchange-related activity,” said Miguel Morel, CEO of Arkham.
This wallet was featured in the top ten BTC wallets by asset size in 2023, ranking it as the sixth largest holder at that time. Since the initial deposit in 2019, these assets had not been moved until this recent transaction. A year later, an OXT user named “Wolf755” claimed the wallet belonged to Huobi (now called HTX). Despite such claims, many blockchain explorers still list the wallet as “unknown.”
Before this recent activity, in November 2023, three Bitcoin whale addresses that had been inactive since November 2017 moved 6,500 BTC, valued at $230 million at that time, to new addresses.
This transaction occurred amid growing institutional interest in Bitcoin, ahead of the anticipated Bitcoin halving event in late April, which is expected to reduce block issuance rewards by half. Despite Bitcoin reaching an all-time high prior to the halving, market participants believe the price has not fully accounted for the impending supply issuance reduction.
Two days after the giant transfer, Bitcoin broke above the $70,000 mark for the first time in ten days on March 25. The resurgence in investor activity has been attributed to the halving anticipation and increased institutional inflows, notably from the launch of ten spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States.
