The price of Bitcoin has been plunging quite dramatically. Recent press releases suggested that while the overall Bitcoin investor community may be selling their positions, it is several Bitcoin “whales” that actually move the market and cause the volatility in Bitcoin’s price.
One huge whale that caught the attention of the community was an investor who, between the span of five days in early December, moved around $3 billion worth of Bitcoin in several wallets.
Around the 3rd of December, an unknown account became active after it moved Bitcoins worth around $256 million from a dormant account that was last active in 2014. According to Cryptopotato, the $256 million was distributed into even amounts in 100 different addresses.
A similar amount of funds has been transferred by the same address, this time the amount was distributed into 101 addresses. Media later found out that there are around 107 addresses with roughly around 8,000 Bitcoins, which was near $3 billion worth of Bitcoins in just these 107 accounts.
While there are many speculations as to why the whale moved the funds, the most interesting question was: who is the whale? According to a blog post by Coinbase released in late November, 2018, the cryptocurrency exchange intended to run some maintenance procedures that could affect all users.
While the exchange did not announce anything too specific, the maintenance performed by them coincided with the whale movement (between December 1 and December 6, 2018).
According to Cryptopotato:
It has become clear that the exchange was distributing user funds between different addresses, which is a common financial network security strategy to spread the risk of a single point of failure.
However, there is no certainty that Coinbase is the actual Bitcoin whale that moved $3 billion worth of the “people’s currency”.