There has been a huge bitcoin transaction worth over half a billion dollars that is currently raising an alarm among cryptocurrency traders. The massive transaction involved the movement of 101,857 bitcoin on April 1. With Bitcoin trading at around $6,700 on the day, the transaction amount was valued at approximately $663 million. Such a huge amount was bound to cause waves in the crypto space. It was immediately brought to the attention of the crypto community by crypto tracker Whale Alert via this tweet.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 101,857 #BTC (633,535,530 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) April 1, 2020
The revelation immediately raised questions about the identity of the crypto holders as well as the motive behind them transacting such huge amounts of funds.
On investigating this matter, Whale Alert traced the movement to an internal transfer done by Xapo, the crypto custody giant. It is reported that Xapo is known for stealing millions of Bitcoins across five continents as well as the Swiss Alps for their clients. In addition to that, Bloomberg reported that it would take two days for clients to access their money in a highly secured Bitcoin process. This process includes fingerprint scanning and the measures of a client’s pulse that ensured that clients did not use amputated hands to unlock assents.
Not only was there a massive transfer from Xapo, but it is also reported that in the last twenty-four hours, five more whales transacted a total of 5,687 Bitcoins that were worth $35.6 million. These kinds of transactions only require two participants, a sender and a receiver, and either party is not required to identify themselves, ideally, these transactions do not even require a human being.
Of the five whale transactions, three of them involved the movement of bitcoins from unknown wallets to exchanges and those were: Unknown Wallets sent 1,500 Bitcoins worth $9.4 million to OKEx, another 1,600 Bitcoins worth $10.1 million sent to Bitmex and lastly 961 Bitcoins that were worth $6.0 million sent to Bitfenex. The other two transactions were from exchanges to unknown wallets. These transactions were carried out as follows, Coinbase sent 826 BTC worth $5.1 million to an unknown wallet and another 800 bitcoins that are worth $5.0 million sent by Bitfinex to an unknown wallet.
Causing more alarm is the huge movement of cryptocurrency from global payments startup Ripple which unlocked one billion XRP from escrow. These funds have been moved to three different wallets and allowed Ripple to manage their XRP holdings. In 2017, Ripple, the owners of over a half of the XRP in the market ,reported to have locked 55 billion XRP and created a schedule that only allowed the release of one billion XRP per month ensuring funds were available for direct transactions to third parties and on crypto exchanges.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
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