Mysterious transfer activity has recently been spotted between major U.S. exchange Kraken and leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC). According to Whale Alert, an unknown major investor recently transferred a colossal amount of BTC, 3,000 coins, worth $262,759,132 million to be exact, to Kraken.
What was the purpose of the transfer? Is it a big sell signal? Why octopus? Let’s dive deeper into the intricacies of blockchain to get answers to these questions.
Whale Alert and Blockstream Explorer do not identify the address “bc1qec0” as belonging to anyone known. Neither does Arkham Intelligence, with its rich and sophisticated database of addresses, especially Bitcoin addresses. This lack of information about the sender suggests that the unknown whale is indeed the individual who sent all the coins to Kraken.
It is worth noting that large transfers to exchanges happen quite often, but most of the time there is no mystery behind them, as it is the exchanges themselves that are simply shuffling funds between their deposit and hot wallets.
However, when a really big transfer happens from an unknown large holder to centralized platforms, it is of great interest as it is seen as the intention of that investor to sell their holdings using the most liquid platform available.
The wallet that transferred 3,000 BTC to Kraken today was only activated a month ago. Since Feb. 26, it has received over $262 million in cryptocurrency from several other unknown wallets, then transferred it all to Kraken, and it is now completely empty.
If the chain of all these events leads to a sell-off, it would be hard to act surprised. Still, Bitcoin is up 0.64% today.