According to the Twitter account of J. Cornor Grogan, a director at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, someone just made a large transaction transferring 27 Bitcoins (equivalent to about 1.2 million USD) to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis wallet address, essentially locking this money permanently.
This transaction took place in the early morning of January 6, with a fee of up to 100 USD, significantly higher than the usual fee at that time. This is a complex chain of transactions, starting from Binance and ending at Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis Wallet.
Genesis Wallet was the first wallet created on the Bitcoin network, owned by its secretive founder Satoshi Nakamoto. Since Nakamoto has been gone since 2010, there is a high possibility that the coins in this wallet will forever remain untouched, as if removed from the circulation chain.
When the creator of Bitcoin stopped interacting with the community, the Genesis Wallet contained only 50 BTC, representing the reward from mining the first Bitcoin block. Over time, many people deposited more BTC into this wallet as a way of expressing gratitude to Satoshi, increasing its current Bitcoin count to 99.67 BTC, worth $4.3 million.
Information about Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis Wallet. Source: Blockchain.com (January 7, 2024)
In addition, there are also rumors that Satoshi Nakamoto is holding up to 1.1 million Bitcoin, equivalent to 47 billion USD at the time of this article. Since there is no return planned, this amount of Bitcoin will likely remain in the Bitcoin founder’s wallet.
It is still unclear who made the 27 BTC transfer and their specific reasons. A special point is that this transaction took place just a few days after the 15th anniversary of Bitcoin’s birth, from the Genesis Block on January 3, 2009.
Related: 15th Anniversary of Bitcoin White Paper: Satoshi Nakamoto’s Enduring Legacy
In addition, a number of companies in the industry are also conducting promotional activities to increase understanding of Bitcoin in the community. A typical example is the effort to put 1 Bitcoin on the Moon of the BitMEX exchange.
