Bitcoins from the Satoshi Nakamoto era have changed addresses for the first time in 16 years

The owner of 100 bitcoins, which had not been moved since July 2010, has finally transferred the coins. The total amount transferred was 100.02 BTC—approximately $ 8.5 million. The transaction was tracked by analysts at Galaxy Research.

The coins had been stored at a single address for over sixteen years. The first transaction was confirmed in block 970 379, after which the funds from the address 1J3A7… CrNHJ3 were distributed among several new wallets. Analysts were unable to identify the owner or determine the reason for the transfer.

David Hoffman, co-founder of the Bankless project, offered his own theory about the events. According to him, owners of old bitcoins may be deliberately transferring funds to addresses whose public keys have not yet been revealed on the blockchain. In this way, they are attempting to protect themselves from a potential quantum threat—a scenario in which future quantum computers would theoretically be capable of breaking the cryptographic protection of old addresses.

The movement of bitcoins that have been dormant since the days of Satoshi Nakamoto always attracts the attention of the crypto community. Addresses from that era are often associated with the network’s earliest participants, and any activity on them sparks a wave of speculation about the owner’s identity.

By comparison, in July, analysts at Arkham Intelligence recorded an even larger transfer—an unknown major investor moved $ 8.6 billion in Bitcoin to new crypto addresses. This transaction marked the largest transfer of Bitcoin in the history of the first cryptocurrency.