Someone Made a Single $1 Billion Bitcoin Transaction and No One Knows Why

It just might be the biggest Bitcoin mystery ever.

In one transaction last week someone mysteriously moved over $1 billion ($1,018,147,900 to be precise), or 94,505 bitcoins. A lot of people would like to know just who did it and why.

Whale Alert is a Twitter account devoted to tracking huge cryptocurrency deals and they tweeted out the first news about it.

Mutual transactions in bitcoin are recorded in a digital ledger and can be seen by anyone who knows where to find them. Where actual accounts are concerned, anonymity is the name of the game, so that’s why we’re aware the move happened but don’t know who pulled the trigger.

An assessment did reveal that nearly 30 percent of the currency came from Huobi Global, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange. The transaction could have been a Huobi customer making a large withdrawal or even the company itself dumping several deposits into one big digital vault.

Tech Times reports that this may have been the largest transaction of its kind:

The transaction appears to be the largest transaction in bitcoin terms. In 2013, someone moved 194,993 bitcoins in one transaction. Bitcoins, however, were less valuable back then so the move was valued at only around $150 million.

Two years earlier in 2011, a single transaction moved 550,000 bitcoin, but since bitcoins were only worth around $3 at the time, the transaction was valued at just $1.5 million.

What does it mean, though? Why the fuss? For one thing, Coindesk reports it raised “bitcoin’s price from $10,569 to $10,790.” 

For another, the very nature of Bitcoin is that it is secretive. Anonymous and untrackable (supposedly) dealings between two parties marked only by a digital ID. It’s hard for some to believe there’s a positive, altruistic reason for that much money to go shifting through the cryptosphere. Secret money for secret things—or straight-up fraud, as this Decrypt article suggested regarding previous huge transactions by asking if they were part of a “Chinese Ponzi scheme.”.

For now, those who monitor Bitcoin and the murky world of cryptocurrency seem to be on alert for another shoe to drop, whatever that means.