After the Twitter user revealed that someone had moved 146,500 BTC ($1B) in one transaction, Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino confirmed that they had refilled a hot wallet with 15K Bitcoins.
The date 2020-04-10 will be marked in history as the time when a huge number of Bitcoins were transferred through Bitfinex at an unusually small fee. According to the blockchain summary, the Bitcoin address that belongs to Bitfinex sent 15,000 BTC to an address of a hot wallet, at a fee of 0.00010019 BTC equivalent to $0.67 at the time of reporting.
However, the transaction involved 161,500.99 BTC, after 15k was sent to the hot wallet the rest were returned to the original address
15K Bitcoin Bitfinex Transaction
It all began when a Twitter user Krisma (@KRMA_0) made a tweet revealing a transaction of 146,500 BTC. In the tweet, he also added a link to blockchain.com that gave more details of the transaction.
Yep, we refilled hot wallet with 15k, rest went back to original address
— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) April 10, 2020
His tweet attracted a lot of attention, whereby at the time of writing it had over 1.3K likes and over 236 retweets. However, it did not take long before Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino confirmed and replied in the comment section that they had refilled a hot wallet with 15K, and the rest went back to the original BTC address.
Some of the followers did not understand why one would move 150K Bitcoins only to move 15K BTC. However, one Twitter user, by the name Beagle Boy (@beagleboybtc) explained that “they prolyl have a consolidated UTXO worth 150K and it’s just the change going back to their wallet”.
A UTXO wallet is the unspent output from a Bitcoin transaction. This is because each transaction begins with coins used in order to balance the blockchain ledger. Using that explanation and referring to the 15K BTC transaction summary in Blockchain.com, it is evident, 15,000 BTC are spent while 146,500 are unspent.
Previous Large BTC Transactions
Since the initial release of Bitcoin eleven years ago, a few huge single transactions have been recorded. In the list of history of BTC transactions, two of them got the attention of the crypto community.
The first one was recorded in the blockchain on 2011-11-16, whereby it involved 550,000.00 BTC equivalent to $3.699 billion, according to the market price at the time of reporting. At that time, it was worth $1.32 million. Surprisingly, all those crypto coins were transferred at no charge.
The second one that got the crypto community’s attention was recorded on 2019-09-06. The transaction involved 94,504.03 BTC, whereby the fee was 0.0653 BTC, equivalent to $700 then.
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