Speculations Suggest Coinbase May Have Been behind 856,000 BTC Transactions

By Rishma Banerjee

As per reports, a Bitcoin whale had recently moved thousands of bitcoin into various wallet addresses between December 1 to December 6, 2018. The whale split 856,000 bitcoin between 107 wallets, sending an equal 8,000 BTC into each wallet.

There are many hypotheses doing the round, since this huge amount sum was moved. Some say that it was a market whale moving funds to Over-the-Counter (OTC) markets while some speculate that the sender could be the Foundation for Economic Education (Fee.org) though the second theory is very unlikely as the listed address on the organization’s website reveals it has only ever received a total of 2.2 BTC.

However according to a report published on 8BTC, it’s seems now that the “whale” was merely Coinbase conducting routine maintenance on its infrastructure. 8BTC’s hypothesis takes into account a Coinbase announcement that said that the exchange was going to make “monitored movements” two days prior to the transactions being made. Coinbase, U.S digital asset platform, had announced a scheduled maintenance on November 29, 2018.

“Over the next seven days, Coinbase will be running scheduled maintenance across our platform that may cause movements on all Coinbase-supported blockchains. These are controlled, closely monitored movements that are being performed in order to provide enhanced security and protection for our customers.”

The major uproar about these coin movements began on December 4, 2018, when 66,452 BTC was transferred from a wallet address that had been inactive since 2014, when it comes to sending funds. The funds were then distributed evenly across 100 wallet addresses.

On completion of transfer, a new transaction of 66,379 BTC was again transferred from another whale address and distributed equally between 101 wallet addresses. A few later, another transaction was initiated, which was followed by another round of distributing the bitcoin into different wallet addresses. This time, 8,000 BTC was transferred into 107 addresses for a total of 856,000 BTC. The total amount transacted, accounts for over 5 percent of the total bitcoins in circulation.

The report also suggests that the SegWit “bc1” addresses had been used by the exchange to get rid of the transactional costs while splitting the funds, which is a standard security protocol to hedge risk and protect funds from a single point of failure.

Large sums of Ether, Ripple and Bitcoin Cash have also been moved in the last 30 days, as well, though that these transfers are related have not been confirmed.