Unknown address accumulates 12,070 BTC in a month

An unknown Bitcoin wallet holds 12,070 BTC (~$462.5 million at the time of writing). The assets were accumulated by a presumed whale over 30 days, according to Arkham Intelligence.

The address was created on November 1, and since then it has been receiving Bitcoin daily from various addresses in large batches. The first sender was a wallet linked to the BitMEX exchange.

The active accumulation of Bitcoin by a single address quickly drew the attention of the community. Wealth Mastery founder Lark Davis said that institutional investors may be trying to “front-run” the approval of the spot ETF backed by digital gold.

A mystery whale has been accumulating large amounts of $BTC recently.

Over the last 4 weeks, they have accumulated 10.3K $BTC.

Seems like Institutional investors are trying to front-run the Spot Bitcoin ETF approval. pic.twitter.com/cTlSMIzSAK

— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) November 30, 2023

The mystery wallet story has even reached Reddit. Some users in the thread speculated its links to large firms or trading platforms, notably BitMEX.

Blockchain analysts told Decrypt that they are more inclined toward the scenario of an exchange moving funds to a cold address.

«We cannot claim with 100% certainty, but its on-chain behavior suggests that it is likely part of a cryptocurrency exchange’s cold storage infrastructure,» said a Chainalysis expert.

Supporting this is that the address has not sent any outgoing transactions, he added.

Amberdata’s Director of Research Chris Martin agreed with this assessment. He said that almost all sources of funds are BitMEX hot addresses, but this wallet does not fit their usual labeling (with the BMEX or qmex suffix).

Martin nevertheless kept the whale hypothesis open, as there is a possibility that a major investor is withdrawing funds from the platform.

Earlier, Henley & Partners counted six Bitcoin billionaires worldwide and another 22 individuals with holdings over $1 billion across various cryptocurrencies.