A Bitcoin wallet that has been dormant for close to five years has gone active and begun transacting by moving coins to various exchanges around the world.
The wallet allegedly connected to Silk Road reportedly started moving coins from its accounts by dividing it in chunks of 100 coins by sub-wallets.
The wallet's activity was first noted by a Reddit user sick_silk, who brought it to the public attention after publishing some of his observations.
How the Coins Were Moved
The original wallet contained 111,114.62 BTC-worth around $844 million-without accounting for other Bitcoin forks.
The owner of the wallet first divided the coins into chunks of 60,000 then to 30,000, 20,000, 10,000 and 5,000, later made sub-wallets of 500 coins and then to 100 coins.
According to the Reddit post, the coins were moved to two of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world-Binance and Bitfinex.
An amount of 11,114 BTC ($80.3 million) was transferred to a Bitfinex wallet while Binance received 4421 BTC ($32 million) totalling to more than $110 million, which represents 14 percent of the original funds.
As the Bitcoin community members continue to piece together the story behind the wallet's activity, data indicates that the address was still active, with five transactions executed this year and 13 in 2017.
All these were some negligible transactions suggesting that it may be the work of someone experienced with moving large amounts of money without raising any suspicion.
The Reddit user sick_silk further says that after running a few checks, he found out the wallet may not be associated with the fallen darknet market Silk Road as previously speculated-the reason being that the address was still active, which means either the FBI did not auction it, or someone else has access to it after evading the FBI.
The user continues to write that if it's not linked to Silk Road, then the other most probable owner is Mt.
Gox, the notorious now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange.
Funds were moved into a cold wallet right after the company filed for bankruptcy a month earlier.
The company continues to process refund requests from users who lost coins in the 2014 Mt. Gox hack, but the policy ended.
Furthermore, the company pooled funds from other wallets in a bid to reimburse creditors.
The other possible explanation is a stocks sales contract between Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman made in April 2013.
People have speculated that it could be a consolidation of Bitcoins by Wright before the launch of Bitcoin SV ( Satoshi Vision).
The plot continues to thicken as the crypto community awaits more details. The identity of sick_silk remains a mystery.
The Reddit user merely created the account before this post with the account having no post history.
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