Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Dan Kitwood
Topics: Money, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, News
Lucy Devine
Topics: Money, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, News
A person who invested over $7,000 into Bitcoin 14 years ago has now reaped the rewards.
After 14 years of lying dormant, two bitcoin wallets holding 10,000 bitcoin each were activated this week.
The wallets - known only as '12tLs...xj2me' and '1KbrS...AWJYm' - moved the bitcoin to new addresses within 30 minutes of each other on Thursday (July 3) and Friday (July 4).
The bitcoin wallets have not been moved again since and have only been moved the one time during their 14 years of remaining dormant.
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While the owners of the wallets - dubbed 'Bitcoin whales' - remain a mystery (as well as why they chose to move the coins after so long) the value of each is now in the billions.
According to decrypt, a whale in cryptocurrency is someone who 'holds a large amount of digital coins and tokens'.
Back in 2011, bitcoin was priced at around $0.78. It has since shot up in value by 13,982,800 percent, meaning the wallets are now worth a staggering $1.1 billion each.
The activity was noticed by Whale Alert, as well as Lookonchain.
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"A dormant address containing 10,000 #BTC (1,092,973,486 USD) has just been activated after 14.3 years (worth 7,793 USD in 2011)!" Whale Alert wrote on X.
This kind of activity is particularly noteworthy, considering the potential market impacts if the coins are sold.
According to Onchain School, moving dormant bitcoin wallets had more than doubled in the first quarter of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024.
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“On-chain data reveals that 62,800 $BTC aged over 7 years were spent between January and March 2025, versus 28,000 $BTC during Q1 2024 — marking a 121% increase in the movement of old coins,” it reported.
“What is remarkable is the amount of self-control that it would have taken through all these market cycles to sit on it for that long,” Caroline Bowler, chief executive officer at BTC Markets told MarketWatch, adding that if the coins were sold, there would no doubt be a shake up in the market.
“Even then you’re talking about a lot of OTC [over the counter] activity to absorb 10,000. But it seems very unlikely that someone would dump 10,000 onto the market in one trade or in equivalents cross the week."
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Caroline added that there are 'dormant wallets out there with significant holdings of bitcoin that are unlikely to ever be activated because people have lost the access to it.' She added: "And that’s what makes it particularly of interest within the bitcoin community when you see one of these things like back up again."