A Bitcoin wallet that was last active in 2013 and contained around a thousand units of the flagship digital asset came to live today, according to a Whale Alert data.
According to the data, in 2013, when the wallet became inactive, a unit of Bitcoin was worth less than $500, which is a negligible fraction of what the asset is worth today.
Holding the coin for the nine years had seen the value of the asset rise by almost 62x, with the asset touching as high as $69k in the bull run of 2021 —if the wallet had been deactivated then, the owner would have raked in almost $70 million. But with it being sold now, the owner received $30 million.
Who Owns the Bitcoin Wallet?
While the wallet owner remains unknown, some members of the crypto community are predicting that the wallet could belong to a federal law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI).
The federal agency, around this period, had arrested the founder of the leading darknet marketplace, Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht. Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the authorities confiscated his Bitcoin holdings.
This is not the first dormant Bitcoin wallet to come to life this year. Whale Alert had detected two inactive wallets, with one of them containing around 500 BTCs while the other held 407 units.
Bitcoin is one of the worst-hit digital assets in the current market downturn. The asset’s value has plummeted to new lows this year as it has majorly traded between the $40k – $50k region until Terra’s stablecoin, UST, lost its $1 peg.
This decline, in turn, pushed the industry’s total market cap below the $1.5 billion mark. However, we reported the coin market cap retouched $585 billion after seeing a brief rise in its price performance within the last 24 hours.